Gabrielle Watson

Dr Gabrielle Watson is a legal scholar specialising in sentencing and criminal justice. At the University of Edinburgh, she holds the Chancellor's Fellowship for ‘cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and innovation’ and ‘a vision for future leadership’ in her field. She is Director of the LLM in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.

Gabrielle is the author of the award-winning Respect and Criminal Justice (OUP 2020) and Key Ideas in Sentencing (Hart Publishing 2027), and co-Editor of Sentencing, Public Opinion, and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Julian V Roberts (OUP 2025). She is a Founding Editor of Palgrave Studies on Sentencing. Launched in 2025, the book series is the first of its kind in the field and commissions works on sentencing of cross-jurisdictional significance.

Gabrielle's research has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the John Fell Fund of the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Society. 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, which reviews the practices of courts exercising criminal jurisdiction in Scotland. She is Advisor to the Sentencing Academy, an organisation dedicated to developing expert understanding of sentencing in England and Wales and informing public debate. She has provided expert commentary to major media outlets including BBC News, BBC Radio, BBC Sounds, BBC World Service, The Times, Times Radio, and TIME. 

Gabrielle returned to Edinburgh in 2023 having spent over a decade at the University of Oxford, where she received MA, MSc, and DPhil degrees and was subsequently appointed Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Law and at Christ Church (2017-19) and Shaw Foundation Fellow in Law at Lincoln College (2019-23). She lectured in criminal law and jurisprudence at Christ Church, Lincoln College, New College, St John's College, St Hugh's College, and St Catherine's College, Oxford, and at the London School of Economics. She is a Research Associate of the Oxford Centre for Criminology, where she is a regular visitor.