Samuel Otu Gyandoh

Samuel Otu Gyandoh was a constitutional scholar who taught law for four decades in Ghana and the United States and helped draft the 1979 Constitution. He was born at Abakrampa in the Central Region on 2 June 1933 and died in 2021.

He went to Mfantsipim School, read law at the University of Southampton and was called to the English bar in 1960 and the Ghana bar in 1961, and took an LLM at Yale in 1965. He joined the University of Ghana law faculty in 1962, becoming associate professor, dean of law and master of Mensah Sarbah Hall. From 1982 to 2002 he taught at Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia, which later named an award for international LLM students after him. On retiring he co-founded the firm Gyandoh Asmah.

He sat on the Constitutional Commission and the Constituent Assembly that produced the 1979 Constitution, and President Limann nominated him as Ombudsman, though the nomination was withdrawn. He co-wrote, with John Griffiths, the Sourcebook of the Constitutional Law of Ghana (1972, revised 2010).