Dr Kirsty Hughes

Kirsty Hughes is an Associate Professor specialising in Human Rights Law. She is joint General Editor of the European Human Rights Law Review, Director of the Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge, a member of Blackstone Chambers Academic Panel and Deputy Editor of Public Law. She is a co-convenor of the European Human Rights Law Conference.

Her research interests are in the fields of UK and European human rights law, and she is particularly interested in the human rights of migrants, modern slavery and human trafficking, the law of protest and the right to privacy. Her co-authored book Human Rights Law in the UK was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. She is also a co-editor on a major collaborative project on Race, Racism and the European Convention on Human Rights, which will be published by Hart Publishing and was a co-editor of Common Law Constitutional Rights (Hart, 2020).

Her research has been published in leading journals including the Modern Law Review, Law Quarterly Review and the Cambridge Law Journal. Her article in the Modern Law Review was awarded the Wedderburn Prize (in honour of Lord Wedderburn of Charlton) and was cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2021. Her article in the Law Quarterly Review was cited by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales, and her submissions to the Joint Select Committee on Privacy and Injunctions (co-authored with Lord Grabiner KC) 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) and 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. 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, a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant which funded her research at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, a Jean Monnet Fellowship at EUI (Firenze), and visiting research fellowships at Harvard and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has also been consulted by the Australian Law Reform Commission on several projects and has lectured at universities in Gdansk, Torun, Wroclaw Lublin and Warsaw (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Budapest (Hungary).

At Cambridge she lectures human rights law, animal rights law and advanced public law, as well as supervising graduate dissertations and theses. In respect of the latter she was shortlisted for the postgraduate research supervisor of the year award at the 2023 Student-Led Teaching Awards, Cambridge. She welcomes applications from potential PhD students interested in pursuing projects within her areas of expertise.