Alison Edelshain will talk about her work as a magistrate and we can participate in a mock trial.
I joined the magistracy in 2013, so has just passed her 10-year anniversary. That is quite a short time compared to many others who have been sitting on the Bench for 30 and 40 years. I sit on the North-West London Bench and we sit at Willesden Magistrates' Court. We hear cases from the Barnet, Brent and Harrow areas. I sit in both the Adult and Youth Criminal courts.
Before becoming a magistrate, I sat on a Judicial Advisory Committee for 10 years where I was the lay person (non-magistrate) sitting alongside two magistrates in selecting new magistrates and also dealing with disciplinary cases of sitting magistrates.
Alongside my role as a magistrate, I am also part of a team which visits local schools running crime prevention programmes for children in Years 7 and 8. Outside of the Court system, following a first degree in History and a later MBA from London Business School, I have spent most of my career in Human Resources ending up as Director of Recruitment and International HR for a major Financial Services company. More recently I now divide up my time between being on two Boards (one as Deputy Chair) where I am most deeply involved with the HR issues, my magistracy work and being a hands-on grandmother (the last being by far the most physically demanding...!).
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