Role
Jonathan Doak is Professor of Criminal Justice and Associate Dean for Research in Nottingham Law School.
Jonathan is a member for the Centre of Rights and Justice, the Centre for Advocacy and the Centre for Mediation and Dispute resolution. Jonathan's main research interests encompass the themes of protection, participation and reparation within criminal justice, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of mechanisms designed to support the evidence of children and those with disabilities. Other interests include the use of non-adversarial forms of dispute resolution (especially restorative justice), the law of evidence and the role of victims within transitional justice.
Jonathan welcomes queries from potential research students interested in pursuing projects the following fields: Criminal Justice, Victimology, Restorative Justice, Transitional Justice, Youth Justice, and the Law of Evidence.
Career overview
Jonathan completed his LLB and doctoral studies at Queen's University Belfast, and has previously taught at Durham University, the University of Sheffield, the Open University and Ulster University.
Research areas
Jonathan's main research interests lie in the broad fields of criminal justice and transitional justice. In particular, his research focuses on the rights of vulnerable parties, the construction of victims' rights as human rights, restorative justice, and criminal evidence.
Much of Jonathan's recent research has been strongly orientated towards socio-legal and theoretical perspectives. In particular, he has focused on deconstructing the nature of victims’ rights against the emergence of international trial norms and the expanding parameters of human rights law. He is particularly interested in analyses of the parallels between victims of state crime and abuse of power and victims of so-called ‘ordinary’ or ‘horizontal’ crime. Jonathan is currently engaged as a co-investigator on a major 3-year project funded by Nuffield, 'Mapping the Changing Face of Cross-Examination'.
External activity
Jonathan sits on thee editorial boards of the International Journal of Evidence and Proof, the Journal of Criminal Law, the British Journal of Community Justice, and the International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice. He also sits on the Advisory Board for the Palgrave Series in Victims and Vicimology.
Sponsors and collaborators
Jonathan has collaborated with a range of organisations in the public and voluntary sectors including;
the Victims’ Rights Agency (Victoria), the Australian Institute of Criminology, the South Australian Law Reform Institute, the National Commission of Restorative Justice (Ireland), the Northern Ireland Law Commission, the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, Interights, Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.