Crabbe JSC, FGA (29 October 1923 – 7 September 2018) was a Ghanaian jurist and public servant.
Crabbe was born on 29 October 1923 at Ussher town in Accra, Gold Coast to Richard Arthur Crabbe, the Chief Registrar of the Courts (the most senior staff of the Judicial Service of the Gold Coast), and his wife Stella Akoley Lartey.
In 1939 he entered Accra Academy at a time when a family relation, Samuel Azu Crabbe, was the school's headboy.
While working with the police, he studied for an intermediate Bachelor of Arts degree through correspondence with Wolsey Hall, Oxford.
E. A. N. Ffoulkes Crabbe, an elder brother, who was Clerk of the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly, as part of government delegation visited London and encouraged him to switch his studies to law.
Together with the New Zealand lawyer Fred Boyce, he drafted the legislations, Ordinances and Acts of Parliament which were passed by the National Assembly on the eve of 6 March 1957 for Ghana's Independence.
[11] In August 1968 he was appointed interim electoral commissioner of Ghana to conduct the 1969 elections on his return from Uganda.
[16] From 1958 to 1963, Crabbe was a tutor and lecturer during the foundation years of the Ghana School of Law until he left for Uganda.
In 1986, he was sent by the scheme to be a professor of legislative drafting at the Cave Hill Campus, Barbados of the University of West Indies.
[20][21] Though gazetted as a recipient of the national honour of Companion of the Order of Volta in 1979, Crabbe was never invited for the investiture.
In November 2013 he received an honorary doctorate from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, after he had assisted the institution to establish its Faculty of Law.
On 15 March 2017 he delivered an inaugural lecture on the theme, The Philosophy of Man after he was elected a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A state funeral, attended by several dignitaries and members of the legal fraternity, was held for him on Thursday 4 October 2018 at the Accra International Conference Centre.