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Dr Richard Watkins

Senior Lecturer

Nottingham Law School

Staff Group(s)
Nottingham Law School staff

Role

Dr Richard Watkins is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School.   Richard is deputy course leader of the Postgraduate Diploma in Law courses, and is module leader of the Law of Trusts module.  Richard is module leader for Land Law on undergraduate LLB programmes, and has previously taught Law of Trusts and International, European Union, and Comparative Law at this level.

In his role as Deputy School Standards and Quality Manager, Richard leads on various aspects relating to quality assurance and academic governance in the School.  Richard has overall responsibility for External Examiners in NLS, and the assessments process.  Richard sits on the School Academic Standards and Quality Committee and the University External Examiner Appointments Panel.

Career overview

Prior to joining Nottingham Law School as Lecturer in Law in September 2019, Richard completed his PhD in Law at the University of Nottingham.  His research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused on the question of how to guarantee soldiers' right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Research areas

Richard's doctoral research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (award ID: 1368568), focused on how to guarantee soldiers' right to life under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  In Smith v Ministry of Defence [2013] UKSC 41, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom determined that British soldiers are "within the jurisdiction" of the UK for the purposes of Article 1 of the Convention anywhere in the world - even when deployed to armed conflicts abroad.  Whilst the Supreme Court's judgment resolved that issue, it left a more significant question unanswered: what is the nature and extent of states' obligations to their soldiers under Article 2?  Richard's thesis tries to define legal standards that offer adequate and meaningful protection for soldiers who lay down their lives to protect their country, but that do not hamper military efficacy.  The thesis considers states' obligations to protect their soldiers' right to life in the context of training accidents (such as the high-profile SAS training selection deaths in the Brecon Beacons), preventing friendly fire, and protecting soldiers from enemy attacks.  Richard plans to publish this research as a monograph.  Richard's plans for future research build upon his doctoral work by considering the possibility of derogation from the right to life under Article 15(2) of the European Convention.  No state has yet availed itself of the possibility of derogating from the right to life.  Richard will consider the approach of the European Court of Human Rights to the effect of derogating from other rights, and the approach of other international human rights treaty bodies to states' right to life obligations during armed conflict.

Richard presented his research at the Society of Legal Scholars annual conference in September 2022.

Course(s) I teach on