Dr Richard John Sutton (23 September 1938 – 17 April 2009) was a New Zealand legal academic and chess player.
He was twice the dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Otago and was the New Zealand national chess champion in 1962–63 and 1970–72.
He was employed at the University of Auckland Law School and in 1980 became a full professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Otago in Dunedin.
Sutton became the New Zealand national chess champion in 1962.
Sutton competed for New Zealand in the 1972 Chess Olympiad in Yugoslavia[1] and in 1975 lost to Jørn Sloth in the final of the world championship of correspondence chess.