Paul McHugh  Paul McHugh (born Gisborne) is a New Zealand academic lawyer. He teaches at the University of Cambridge where he is a Professor in Law and Legal History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He graduated LL.B.(Hons I) from Victoria University of Wellington, LLM (Saskatchewan), and obtained his PhD at Cambridge with his dissertation "The aboriginal rights of the New Zealand Maori at common law" (which was awarded a Yorke Prize in 1988). It will be republished by Institute of Post-Treaty Settlements Office as a classic influential text. McHugh's work has primarily been in the field of common-law aboriginal rights, a topic on which he has published extensively. He is recognised as an authority on the legal status of tribal peoples in North America and Australasia; as both a doctrinal scholar and as a legal historian, as well as writer on the 'politics of historiography.' His work on the doctrine of aboriginal title in New Zealand argued that there remained unextinguished Māori rights around the coastline. The High Court accepted and cited his work in the "Te Weehi" case (1986), leading to a series of cases in which New Zealand courts applied Māori customary law, recognising it as the basis for Māori rights and exemption from the regulatory regime of the Fisheries Act 1988. His early academic reputation rests upon his pioneering work on the status of the common law doctrine of aboriginal title, a field to which he returned after the "Ngati Apa" case (2003) reactivated this debate in New Zealand. The Court's judgments led to the foreshore and seabed controversy (2003-4) which fundamentally changed the course of New Zealand politics and ruptured the Maori Rātana movement's longstanding alliance with the Labour Party. McHugh is recognised as a leading authority on common law aboriginal title and the legal character of tribal peoples' property rights throughout the common law world. It is believed the New Zealand Government's willingness to settle the Maori commercial sea fisheries claim (1992) was directly attributable to McHugh's work and, associated with it, high-placed anxiety about an 'activist' New Zealand Court of Appeal. The President Robin Cooke, Baron Cooke of Thorndon, as he became (1995) was known to hold a personal copy of McHugh's dissertation and in conversation with him as well as having shown judicial mettle in the "Maori Council" cases of the time.