Siven Watt

Legal Fellow

Siven Watt (@SivenWatt) is a Legal Fellow at Just Security, based at New York University School of Law. He works on issues of accountability, democracy, and the rule of law in the United States. He was project director and a principal drafter of the “Mar-a-Lago Model Prosecution Memo,” overseeing a team of student staff editors from NYU and Yale law school. In 2020-2021, he served as an Associate Editor of Just Security and in that capacity was responsible for producing the Early Edition, a curated summary of national and global news implicating U.S. national security, democracy, and rights.

He is based in the U.K. and will be called to the Bar of England and Wales in March 2023, having recently completed his bar studies on a prestigious full fees scholarship (the Princes of Wales scholarship) from Gray’s Inn. Siven previously completed a BA in Politics, Philosophy and History at Birkbeck College, University of London, before going on to complete the Graduate Diploma in Law at the University of Law, and finally being awarded the Lord Blunkett Widening Access Award scholarship to undertake an LLM in International Human Rights.

Siven has a rich human rights background, including as a Senior Legal Fellow at the U.K. human rights organization JUSTICE, working on tackling racial injustice in the criminal youth justice system, improving the parole system of England and Wales, and reforming institutional responses to deaths or other serious incidents where a “systemic pattern of failure” is evident. He also worked as a researcher and assistant to Professor Leslie Thomas K.C. (an English barrister who specializes in inquests, civil liberties, and public law), working on, inter alia, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and various human rights actions against the state for deaths in custody. Siven also assisted Professor Felicity Gerry K.C., an international lawyer specializing in human trafficking and the law of joint enterprise, on a published piece into cryptocurrency and human trafficking.