John Atta Mills - Early Career

Early Career

Mills' first formal teaching assignment was as a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ghana. He spent close to twenty five years teaching at Legon and other institutions of higher learning. In 1971, he was selected for the Fulbright Scholar programme at Stanford Law School in the US.

He returned to Ghana at the end of the international educational exchange fellowship to work at his alma mater, the University of Ghana, for 25 years. He became a visiting professor at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA), with two stints from 1978 to 1979, and 1986 to 1987. He was also a visiting lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 1985 to 1986. During this period, he authored several publications relating to taxation during the 1970s and 1980s.

Outside of his academic pursuits, Mills was the Acting Commissioner of Ghana's Internal Revenue Service from 1988 to 1993 under President Jerry John Rawlings, and the substantive Commissioner from 1993 to 1996. By 1992, he had become an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Ghana. In 2002, he was a visiting scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada through a joint Canadian International Development Agency(CIDA) - International Development Research Centre (IDRC) fellowship programme.