Samuel Date-Bah

Samuel Kofi Date-Bah is a legal scholar and retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, where he sat from 2008 to 2013. He was born in 1943.

He went to Achimota School and took a first-class law degree at the University of Ghana in 1965, followed by an LLM at Yale and a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1969. He taught at the University of Ghana for twelve years, rising to associate professor, and then at the University of Nairobi and the University of Calabar in Nigeria, where he headed the department of private law.

From 1984 to 2003 he was legal adviser at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. He led the team that helped newly independent Namibia negotiate its diamond joint venture with De Beers, and he worked on the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. In the 1970s he represented Ghana at the UN Commission on International Trade Law and chaired it in 1978. He also sat on the Supreme Court of The Gambia. Since retiring he has chaired the Ghana Law Reform Commission, the University of Ghana Council and the board of the Data Protection Commission.