Dr Gabrielle Watson

Chancellor’s Fellow

LLB (Edinburgh) MA, MSc, DPhil (Oxford)

Office hours:

By Appointment

Email: gabrielle.watson@ed.ac.uk

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Dr Gabrielle Watson is a legal scholar specialising in criminal law and justice. At Edinburgh, she is the recipient of the Chancellor's Fellowship for ‘cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and innovation’ and ‘a vision for future leadership’ in her field. Since 2023, she has been Director of the LLM in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, and of the Empirical Legal Research Network.

Gabrielle is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary research project entitled Judicial Nudging: The First Decade of the Scottish Sentencing Council. As an independent statutory body, the Council is tasked with devising sentencing guidelines for the criminal courts: the most significant development in Scottish sentencing law in a century. The project tracks the steady accretion of generic and offence-specific guidelines since 2018 and explores the legal and ethical implications of ‘nudging’ judges towards fair and consistent sentencing decisions.

Gabrielle is the author of the award-winning Respect and Criminal Justice (OUP 2020) and Editor of Sentencing, Public Opinion, and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Julian V Roberts (OUP 2025). Her research has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice (2019, 2021), Downing College, Cambridge (2021), and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany (2023).

In 2024, Gabrielle was appointed by the Lord Justice General to the Criminal Courts Rules Council for a three-year term. She also acts as Advisor to the Sentencing Academy, a London-based organisation dedicated to developing expert understanding of sentencing in England and Wales and informing public debate. 

Gabrielle read for her doctorate at the University of Oxford and was formerly Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Law and at Christ Church (2017-19) and Shaw Foundation Fellow and Tutor in Law at Lincoln College (2019-23). She remains affiliated to Oxford as a Research Associate of the Centre for Criminology, where she is a regular visitor.