I'm Dr Alexandra Hearne — most people call me Allie. I did my PhD in law at UCL, where I now teach as an Associate Lecturer in Legal Theory and Criminal Law, and I'm currently a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg. My research sits where criminal law, legal theory, and moral responsibility meet — questions about blame, culpability, and why we hold people accountable in law and personal life. In practice that means I spend most of my working life thinking hard about exactly the ideas students tend to find most demanding, and, once they click, most rewarding.

I've been teaching at UCL for six years, across jurisprudence and legal theory, criminal law, and study skills. In that time I've worked with students at every stage — from first-years meeting legal reasoning for the first time to finalists sharpening their exam technique — so I have a good sense of where people commonly get stuck and, more importantly, how to get them unstuck.

No two students learn the same way, so I tailor each session to what you actually need rather than working from a fixed script. I aim to keep things collaborative and low-pressure: the best learning happens when you feel comfortable thinking out loud, asking the "obvious" question, and being wrong on the way to being right.

I put particular weight on the two skills that quietly decide most results and are the most underestimated: exam preparation and essay writing. Plenty of students know the material well but lose marks because they haven't been taught how to structure an argument, answer the question that was actually asked, or write to time under pressure. These are learnable skills, not innate talents — and because I research, write, and assess in these areas myself, I can show you concretely what strong legal writing looks like and what examiners are really rewarding. My goal is for you to leave not just knowing more, but genuinely more confident in how you think and write about law.