High Court judge and former Labour politician, Sir Ross Cranston gave a lecture on the role of the judiciary at Queen Mary, University of London, on 1 March 2012. The event was chaired by the The Master of the Rolls, Rt. Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury.
The annual Law and Society Lecture is a particular highlight in the legal calendar at Queen Mary. You can listen to podcasts from past speakers such as Shami Chakrabarti CBE, the director of human rights group Liberty and Rabinder Singh QC.
At securing Sir Ross Cranston, who has a long-standing connection to the College, Professor Peter Alldridge, Head of the Department of Law at Queen Mary, says: “To the best of my knowledge no-one has ever been, at different times, a law professor, a member of the government (in his case, Solicitor-General), an MP and a judge. He is uniquely qualified to address the pressing issues with which the lecture deals.”
Educated at the University of Queensland, Harvard Law School and Oxford University, Sir Ross Cranston FBA became a barrister at Gray’s Inn in 1976. He sat as the Sir John Lubbock chair in Banking Law at QM, and as a Professor of Law at the College from 1986-91. Before 1992, Sir Ross was also Director of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies and Dean of Laws at Queen Mary. He is currently a fellow of the British Academy.
From 1992 until 1997, Sir Ross Cranston was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Cassel Professor of Commercial Law and in 1997 was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament for Dudley North. He served as Solicitor General from 1998 to 2001, later returning to the back benches.