Lebrecht James Chinery-Hesse

Lebrecht James Nii Tettey Chinery-Hesse was a lawyer and legislative draftsman who served as Ghana's Solicitor-General and acting Attorney-General, and drafted laws for Uganda, Zambia and Sierra Leone. He was born in Jamestown, Accra, on 19 October 1930 and died on 30 August 2018.

He went to the Osu Salem school, Accra Academy and Adisadel College, and studied classics at the University of Hull, winning the top prize, before switching to law. He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1956 and returned home in the year of independence. He joined the public service as an assistant state attorney in 1959, became chief parliamentary draftsman in 1966 and acted as Solicitor-General from 1969, and was acting Attorney-General in 1979.

He left Ghana in 1982 to be First Parliamentary Counsel of Sierra Leone, worked in Zambia, and from 1989 to 2014 was a legislative drafting expert at Uganda's Ministry of Justice. In 1991 he sat on the Committee of Experts, chaired by S. K. B. Asante, that prepared proposals for Ghana's 1992 Constitution. He was married to the diplomat Mary Chinery-Hesse, the first woman chancellor of the University of Ghana, and their son was the technology entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse.