Ross Cranston

Sir Ross Frederick Cranston (born 23 July 1948 in Brisbane, Australia), styled The Hon. Mr Justice Cranston, is a High Court judge, formerly an academic lawyer and Labour Party politician, in the United Kingdom.

He attended Wavell State High School in Brisbane, Queensland. He was later a student at the University of Queensland where he was awarded a BA in 1969 and an LLB in 1970. From the Harvard Law School, he gained an LLM in 1973. From Oxford University, he gained a DPhil in 1976 and much later a DCL in 1998. He became a barrister at Gray's Inn in 1976.

Cranston was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1992-7 and the holder of the Cassell Chair in Commercial Law from 1993 to 1997. Before that he held academic posts in the UK and Australia and the Sir John Lubbock chair in Banking Law at QMW, being a professor of Law at Queen Mary and Westfield College from 1986-91.

He contested Richmond (Yorks) in 1992. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Dudley North at the 1997 general election with more than half of the votes, and served as Solicitor General from 1998 to 2001, when he returned to the back benches. After speculation amongst colleagues, he announced in 2005 that he would not stand for Parliament again in the 2005 election. He was succeeded by Ian Austin.

He was the Centennial Professor of Law at the LSE from 2005 to 2007.

He was appointed as a High Court judge in October 2007, assigned to the Queen's Bench Division. Marcel Berlins wrote at the time that his appointment was unusual among judicial appointments in recent years, given that it occurred so soon after the end of his political career.