Siven Watt

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, and also leads on our regularly updated Trump Trials Clearinghouse and Trump Master Calendar. 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 U.A.E. and was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2023, having completed his bar studies on a prestigious full-fees scholarship (the Princes of Wales Scholarship) from Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. Previously, Siven received a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and History from Birkbeck College, University of London, an accelerated graduate LL.B. from the University of Law, before finally being awarded the Lord Blunkett Widening Access Award scholarship to undertake an LL.M. in International Human Rights at the University of Law. He is also on LinkedIn.

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.