 <p>Had the same issue when attempting to use $watch for data binding. </p> <p>At this time of writing, the current version of Angular New Router (v0.5.3) could not instantiate controller with $scope injected. The <a href="https://github.com/angular/router/issues/313" rel="nofollow">issue</a> was logged on github.</p> <p>According to a separate thread, there is an interim package on npm with the fix of this issue. Check out <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/30215177/4904267">zVictor's post</a> for instructions.</p>