Dr Victoria McCloud is a judge sitting in the High Court where she hears litigation ranging from contractual disputes to historic child abuse, media and constitutional law. Her background was in experimental psychology. Her doctoral research at Oxford in the relatively early days of neural networks, concerned characteristics of the computational functions used by the brain in interpreting 3D scenes. She is also (in addition to her judicial role) at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford, researching AI and online political discourse. She is an affiliate of the Swiss Re Programme for Civil Justice Systems where she has an interest in the ethical regulation of businesses using intelligent and ‘big data’ technologies.
Her books include The Surveillance and Intelligence Law Handbook (OUP), and others. Her papers include ‘Suing in Cyberspace’ (Civil Justice Quarterly, 2016) and ‘Privacy Impact Assessment and Public Space Surveillance’ (Covert Policing Review, 2007). She sits on the All Party Parliamentary Group on AI, as an expert advisor.
In 2018 she was named as one of 100 women between 1919-2019 whose biographies are preserved marking the first centenary of women in law as a source of role-models redressing the gender-imbalance in the record of the legal professions.