Professor Dawn Watkins
School of Law
Professor of Law
Project Lead: Project FORTITUDE
+44 114 222 6827
Full contact details
School of Law
EF01
Bartolomé House
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND
- Profile
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Dawn joined the School of Law here in Sheffield on 1 January 2022. She was previously a Professor of Law at the University of Leicester, where she had worked since 2005. Dawn is a qualified Solicitor but left legal practice soon after qualifying to pursue a PhD in Law.
Whilst at Leicester she was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Fellowship and short-listed for the National Law Teacher of the Year award. She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2017.
In 2014-16 Dawn secured a £250,000 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council to explore children’s understanding of law in their everyday lives, using a digital game ‘Adventures with Lex’ created by the research team to gather research data.
This provided the proof of concept for project FORTITUDE, an action research project funded by a c.€2 million grant from the European Research Council, which completed in May 2025. It aims to improve children and young people’s legal capability.Dawn and her research team have worked with children and young people to create a game called Law Yeah! which is available both as a digital game and as a board game. As well as drawing on theories of play and serious game design, the development of the Law Yeah! game was informed by a new framework for developing children’s legal capability, created in this project.
In addition to her academic work, Dawn sits as a Fee-Paid Judge of the First Tier Tribunal, assigned to the Health, Education and Social Care Chamber.
- Qualifications
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PhD (Law) University of Leicester
- Research interests
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- Children and the Law
- Gamification of Research Methods
- Law and Narrative
- Publications
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Books
- Research Methods in Law. Routledge.
Edited books
- Introduction..
- Research Methods in Law. Routledge.
Journal articles
- Exploring the role of domestic law in human rights education. Human Rights Education Review, 5(2), 98-116. View this article in WRRO
- Envisioning research through a lens of play. The Journal of Play in Adulthood, 4(1).
- Reimagining the relationship between legal capability and the capabilities approach. International Journal of Public Legal Education, 5(1), 4-36.
- Automatic voice emotion recognition of child-parent conversations in natural settings. Behaviour & Information Technology, 40(11), 1072-1089.
- Using narrative and metaphor in formative feedback: Exploring students' responses. Journal of Legal Education, 68(1), 154-175.
- Exploring children's understanding of law in their everyday lives. Legal Studies, 38(1), 59-78.
- Adventures with Lex: The gamification of research?. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 24(3), 229-250.
- Working with law students to develop legal literacy materials. The Law Teacher, 50(2), 195-208.
- Alexander Pope and The Rape of the Lock – Conciliation or Judgment?. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 8(2), 244-265.
- The Role of Narratives in Legal Education. Liverpool Law Review, 32(2), 113-133.
- Podcasting: a lawyer's tale. The Law Teacher, 44(2), 169-180.
- The Influence of the Art for Art's Sake Movement upon English Law, 1780–1959. The Journal of Legal History, 28(2), 233-256.
- A Framework for Developing Children’s Legal Capability. Legal Studies.
- Exploring Children’s Understanding of the Legal Rights of Suspects in England and Wales. Youth Justice, 147322542110305-147322542110305.
- ‘If you are 10, you go to prison’: children’s understanding of the age of criminal responsibility. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 67(3), 311-326.
Chapters
- Children, schools and legal education, Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Education (pp. 56-58). Edward Elgar Publishing
- Interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration in legal education in England and Wales, Key Directions in Legal Education: National and International Perspectives (pp. 35-47).
- Dagenham Car Plant Strike, 1968, Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (pp. 291-296).
- Legal research in the humanities, Research Methods in Law (pp. 86-102).
- Legal research in the humanities, Research Methods in Law (pp. 71-84).
Conference proceedings papers
- A child-centred design evaluation of a learning game to improve children’s legal capability. Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Games Based Learning, Vol. 18(1) (pp 580-589). Aarhus University, Denmark, 3 October 2024 - 3 October 2024. View this article in WRRO
- Involving Children in the Design of Gamified Law-Related Tests. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference
- An Experiential Approach to the Design and Evaluation of a Gamified Research Tool for Law in Children's Lives. Proceedings of the The 15th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children
- Research Methods in Law. Routledge.
- Research group
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Title/Description: Project FORTITUDE
- Awarding Body: European Research Council
- People Involved: Collaborating with Professor Clare Wood, NTU
- Dates: 1 January 2022 to 31 May 2025
- Amount (EUR): c. 2 million euros
Title/Description: Law in Children's Lives
- Awarding Body: ESRC
- Dates: 2014-2016
- Teaching interests
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- The role of narrative and metaphor in teaching
- Law and story-telling
- Property law
- Children and the law
- Teaching activities
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Module I teach:
Undergraduate
- Property Law
- Children and the Law
- Professional activities and memberships
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Editorial Board of the Law Teacher Journal