Dr Victoria Elizabeth Hooton (she/her)

Victoria joined the School of Law at the University of Sheffield in 2025 as a Lecturer. Prior to joining, she held a position at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt), where she was a research fellow between 2021 and 2025. She also previously held a position as a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Portsmouth (2019–2021), where she taught EU law, Employment Law, Public Law, and Tort.

She specialises in European Union law, social welfare law, equality, human rights, employment, and legal history. Her work is defined by its strong socio-legal and historical orientation, with a particular focus on free movement, citizenship, and access to social protection in Europe and beyond. She has published widely in leading journals in her subject areas, including the European Journal of Social Security, Journal of Social Security Law, Industrial Law Journal and the European Labour Law Journal. Her monograph, Free Movement and Welfare Access in the European Union (Hart, 2024) was nominated for the Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Early Career Scholarship in 2025.

Victoria remains an associate researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, where she guest lectures on the legal history of EU Citizenship for the Goethe University Frankfurt. She is also an organising member of the Max Planck European Law Group, and has previously been the lead organiser of their annual ECR conference on topical issues in EU and ECHR law.

Having taught law since 2017, Victoria is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE) and enjoys taking an inclusive, research-led approach to teaching that gives students the opportunity to increase their subject knowledge whilst gaining confidence and critical thinking/research skills.