Gabrielle Watson

Dr Gabrielle Watson is a specialist in sentencing and criminal justice. At the University of 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. 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 co-Editor of Sentencing, Public Opinion, and Criminal Justice (OUP 2025). She is currently writing her next monograph, entitled Just Words? Sentencing and the Language of Criminal Justice. With Professor Julian V Roberts KC (Hon), she is Series Editor of Palgrave Studies on Sentencing. Launched in Spring 2025, the series is the first of its kind in the field, commissioning works on sentencing of cross-jurisdictional significance.

Gabrielle's 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, which reviews the procedures and practices of courts exercising criminal jurisdiction in Scotland. She is Advisor to the Sentencing Academy, a London-based organisation dedicated to developing expert understanding of sentencing in England and Wales and informing public debate. She has been engaged as a criminal justice expert for major media outlets including BBC News, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, Times Radio, and TIME. 

Gabrielle returned to Edinburgh in 2023 after 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 remains a Research Associate of the Oxford Centre for Criminology, where she is a regular visitor.