Sir Ross Frederick Cranston retired from the High Court of Justice of England and Wales in March 2017, where he was appointed to the Queen’s Bench Division in October 2007. Prior to this he was an elected Member of Parliament for Dudley North since the 1997 general election, and served as Solicitor General from 1998 to 2001.
Sir Ross was born on 23 July 1948 in Brisbane, Australia. After attending Wavell State High School, he studied at The University of Queensland. He completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1969 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1970. In 1973, he gained his Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, and went on to Oxford University where he was awarded DPhil in 1976 and a DCL in 1998.
In 1991, he was appointed a Recorder. He was the academic consultant to Lord Woolf’s inquiry into access to justice and an assessor to Lord Justice Jackson’s review of civil litigation costs. He has held consultancies with UNCTAD, the World Bank, the IMF and the Commonwealth Secretariat to advise different countries on commercial, banking and securities laws.
Sir Ross held the first chair of banking law in Britain, the Lubbock Chair at Queen Mary, University of London and was Cassel Professor of Commercial Law (and later Centennial Professor) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written extensively on banking, commercial and public law including Principles of Banking Law and How Law Works, both published by OUP.
From 2005-2016 he undertook reviews for the European Commission of the legal systems of Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey. He was a member of the legal advisory panel of the National Consumer Council in Britain and chair of trustees of the whistleblower’s charity, Public Concern at Work. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Sir Ross has returned to the LSE as a professor of law.