Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill

Kwamena Bentsi-Enchill was a lawyer, legal scholar and Supreme Court justice who founded the law faculty of the University of Zambia. He was born at Saltpond on 22 September 1919 and died on 21 October 1974.

He was at Achimota College from 1927 to 1941, taught at Mfantsipim, and read philosophy, politics and economics at Oriel College, Oxford. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1950, did pupillage under Edward Akufo-Addo and set up Naoferg Chambers in Accra. He stood for Saltpond as an independent in 1954, after leaving the CPP, and was secretary of the Ghana Bar Association from 1958 to 1960. For the International Commission of Jurists he sat on the committee that investigated charges of genocide in Tibet.

He gave up practice to teach at the new Ghana School of Law, took an LLM at Harvard and a doctorate at Chicago, and in 1966 became founding dean of law at the University of Zambia, where he started the Zambia Law Journal. He wrote Land Law in Ghana (1964). He sat on Ghana's Supreme Court from 1971 until the 1972 coup abolished it, then chaired the Volta River Authority and served as Commissioner for Stool Lands. He died of injuries from a car crash on the Aburi road, leaving a wife and five children.