(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).
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 associated with the view that common law aboriginal title was primarily a legal argument devised (in western Canada initially) during the early 1970s and following decade to deal with the inaction of the political branches (their incapacity to legislate comprehensive land rights/claims regimes).
McHugh was amongst a small group of lawyer/scholars during the 1980s (Brian Slattery, Kent McNeil, Henry Reynolds, Barbara Hocking, Richard Bartlett, Tom Berger) to package aboriginal title in a manner that became palatable to courts.
He made considerable public lectures and practitioners workshops in New Zealand during this period, and his work was regarded as influential at the highest political levels (including a half-day presentation to the Parliamentary Select Committee and Waitangi Tribunal).
As the controversy waged (particularly during the lifetime of the Clark premiership and the Fifth Labour Government of New Zealand redrawing the country's political map), his published work returned to the more doctrinal orientation it had taken during his early career before his so-called 'Pocockian turn' described in Mark Hickford's important book Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) at 221-3 and Bernard Cadogan 'Treaty and Method' (online at this link).
[3] This paper, with its argument for the recognition of Crown and tribe in ongoing relations from which exit is not possible and finality and closure illusory, influenced the move towards more 'relational' approaches in the public sphere where Māori issues were to be seen in terms of living relationships rather than a sequence of problems to be eliminated.
In 2010 he appeared as expert witness before the Waitangi Tribunal on the Te Tii Marae, Kerikeri,[clarification needed] explaining the legal basis of the British annexation of New Zealand.
McHugh looks at the gestation, early formation and conceptualisation of the doctrine in western Canada through its articulation by scholars, adoption by courts there, in New Zealand and Australia (as native title), its subsequent elaboration in Canadian and Australian case law – the busiest jurisdictions – through a proprietary paradigm located primarily (and more and more constrictively) inside adjudicative processes.
He also considers the issues of inter-disciplinary thought and practice arising from national legal systems' recognition of aboriginal land rights, including the emergent and associated themes of self-determination that surfaced more overtly during the 1990s and after.
He is in considerable demand internationally to give public lectures and workshops on the rights of aboriginal peoples in both an historical and present-day setting, in Canada and New Zealand especially, and is regarded as one of the most influential scholars in the field.