Dr Kirsty Hughes is a University Lecturer specialising in Human Rights and Public Law. She is a member of the Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College where she is a Director of Studies. She lectures and supervises students in Civil Liberties and Human Rights, European Human Rights Law, Public Law, Law and Information, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. She is currently supervising doctoral and masters’ theses on a range of human rights, public law and information law topics.

Her research interests are in the fields of human rights, public law and media law, and she employs a range of multidisciplinary, theoretical, comparative and doctrinal approaches. She is particularly interested in human rights theory and the relationship between theory and human rights reasoning, the human rights of migrants, the law of privacy, surveillance, photographs, free speech, hate speech and protest.

Her research has been published in leading journals including the Modern Law Review, Law Quarterly Review and the Cambridge Law Journal. Her 2012 article in the Modern Law Review was awarded the Wedderburn Prize (in honour of Lord Wedderburn of Charlton). Her 2011 article in the Law Quarterly Review was cited in the Court of Appeal in Independent Trustee Services Ltd v GP Noble Trustees Ltd & Ors [2012] EWCA Civ 195, and her submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Privacy and Injunctions (co-authored with Lord Grabiner QC) were relied upon in the Joint Committee's Report Privacy and Injunctions (March 2012). Her submissions to the Joint Committee on Human Rights on EU nationals' residency post-Brexit were cited in their final report (December 2016). In October 2017 she was invited to give oral evidence to the House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee inquiry 'Brexit: Citizens' Rights'. She has also contributed to national and international media coverage on legal issues, including the BBC, The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her forthcoming book Dimensions of Privacy: Privacy Theory and Article 8 European Convention on Human Rights (Hart Publishing) uses privacy theory to critically analyse Article 8 ECHR and vice versa. It provides a comprehensive and thematic account of the privacy protection afforded by Article 8 ECHR and brings together for the first time privacy theory and Article 8 ECHR jurisprudence. She has been the recipient of a number of research fellowships including a CRASSH research fellowship at the University of Cambridge to work on a project concerning the right to protest, a visiting research fellowship at UNSW, and a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant which funded her research at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. 

Prior to taking up a University lectureship, Dr Hughes was the Turpin-Lipstein Lecturer in Law at Clare College from 2009-2013. She  completed her doctoral thesis on the right to privacy in the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (supervised by Professor David Feldman QC). During that time she also worked at the Australian Law Reform Commission on the project For Your Information: Australian Privacy Law and Practice. In 2005 she held an academic position at the British Law Centre, University of Warsaw (Poland), and lectured at universities in Gdansk, Torun, Wroclaw and Lublin (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Budapest (Hungary).

Dr Hughes is a member of the Privacy Law Scholars Conference Committee, she co-directs the International Privacy Law Conference in conjunction with Professor Neil Richards (Washington University), and she previously co-convened the Civil Liberties and Human Rights section of the Society for Legal Scholars. In 2015 she established the Cambridge Human Rights mooting team to compete in the European Human Rights Moot Court Competition and in 2017 she established the Cambridge Human Rights Film Series. 

She is a member of Blackstone Chambers Academic Panel and a member of the Editorial Board of Public Law.