Victoria McCloud (PhD) is Advisory Head of Interdisciplinary Collaborations at EURO-EXPERT. She is a British judge and Master in the High Court of England and Wales. She is also a chartered psychologist and legal author. She graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1990 with a degree in Experimental Psychology and a doctorate in 1993 in human visual system science and was called to the bar in 1995. From 2006, she was a Deputy Costs Judge/Taxing Master. She was appointed a Queen’s Bench Master in June 2010 and also re-appointed as a Costs Judge / Taxing Master in 2017.

Judge Victoria McCloud sits in London as King’s Bench Master in the High Court and she is also a former deputy Costs Judge. She was a contributor to the Equal Treatment Bench Book 2021 in the UK and contributes to the Civil Justice Council working group on Pre-Action Protocols. She is a Chartered Psychologist in England and Wales, and the Republic of Ireland. She has been significantly involved in facilitating escaped Afghan women judges in the UK to find employment and training.

Victoria is a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London University, and is the Advisory Head of Interdisciplinary Collaboration at Euro-Expert. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, and engaged in the design and teaching of a forthcoming course at King’s London University, in Legal Technology.

She is one of a small number of nominated national Whistleblowing judges appointed by the Lord Chief Justice to help judges address concerns they may have about any wrongdoing in the justice system. She is also an expert contributing to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Expert Working Group on Non-Recent Child Sexual Abuse and handles many civil high court claims brought by victims.

She was the youngest judge of her type to have been appointed, and the second woman, when she was appointed to her present position in 2010. Before becoming a judge she was a civil barrister. Victoria was selected for the Women of the Year Awards 2021 in the UK and is one of the Sunday Times’ ’50 Women of the Year’ 2020. In 2019 she was chosen by the ‘First 100 Years’ project to be one of the 100 role model women in the legal field spanning the first century since women were permitted to practise law in the UK.  She was awarded the Professional Paralegal Register Outstanding Achievement Award, 2022. 

She is believed to have been the first ‘trans’ judge appointed in the common law world and certainly in the UK, when she was appointed to her first deputy appointment in 2006.

Judge McCloud has been an author in the fields of law and Surveillance and Intelligence for many years, having been an editor of the White Book since 2000. Her books include numerous Civil Procedure books and papers, and also The Surveillance & Intelligence Law Handbook’ (OUP) as well as a short book of poetry entitled Cable Landings (2021).

Her doctorate (1993) was obtained by research in Experimental Psychology in human visual psychophysics, which focussed on the computational means by which the brain integrates sources of depth information received via the visual system.