Professor Hughes joined the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law in 2011 and served as Associate Dean from 2015 to Fall 2025. She began as Associate Dean for Faculty then served as both Associate Dean for Faculty and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs before becoming Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. In the decade she served as associate dean, she continued to teach a full teaching load, often teaching more students each year than any other faculty member.

In the past ten years alone, Professor Hughes has given more than 80 presentations in her areas of expertise, including criminal law, the death penalty, and legal ethics. Her scholarship has appeared in a variety of law reviews and presses, including Cambridge University Press, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Iowa Law Review, Michigan State Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Rutgers University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Carolina Academic Press, and West Academic Press. She is the co-author of Criminal Law Simulations and two casebooks (Federal Habeas Corpus and The Law and Ethics of Law Practice), and she recently joined the forthcoming editions of Mastering Criminal Procedure (Volumes I and II).

Before joining the Iowa Law Faculty, she was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, where she taught criminal law, criminal procedure (investigations and adjudication), and a seminar discussing mitigation and the death penalty. At Washington University she also co-directed the Criminal Justice Clinic, where she supervised law students representing indigent clients facing felony charges in Saint Louis County.

Prior to joining the faculty at Washington University, Professor Hughes was Associate Director of the Center for Justice in Capital Cases at DePaul University College of Law, where she worked in the legal clinic representing indigent clients on capital cases.

Professor Hughes’s other experience includes working as a public defender for the Office of the Iowa State Public Defender and as a Sacks Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, where she worked with clinical law students in Roxbury and Dorchester representing juvenile and adult clients on misdemeanor and felony charges.

Professor Hughes clerked for the Honorable Michael J. Melloy, then Chief Judge of the Northern District of Iowa before he joined the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

View Publications     Download CV

Research and Teaching: 

• Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure

Affiliations:

• Illinois Bar
• Iowa Bar
• Missouri Bar
• United States Supreme Court Bar
• United States District Court, Northern District of Iowa Bar