Welcome ETF's Founder, Christine E. Ohenewah.

NEW YORK — Christine Ohenewah was driving for Uber when the realization hit her: she was a highly educated woman with multiple graduate degrees, navigating the same economic uncertainty as many of her passengers. She was experiencing firsthand the disconnect between credentials and opportunity, between intelligence and access. Though, instead of concluding this as having failed, Ohenewah began to use view her situation as a form of empirical research.

“My journey to founding a legal think tank centering public engagement began long before I ever imagined myself hauling a briefcase through a courthouse or teaching front and center in a lecture hall,” Ohenewah reflects, now serving as the Founder and Principal of the Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation. “Being born in Accra, Ghana, and immigrating to North America at age two, I learned early on that navigating between worlds—cultural, linguistic, economic—requires a kind of emotional intellect, wisdom, and resiliency that no textbook can teach me.”

Ohenewah’s emotional intelligence would become the foundation of a revolutionary approach to legal education that challenges everything the profession believes about qualifications, capability, and who deserves to wield legal power.

The Unconventional Path to Legal Authority

Ohenewah’s path was not linear. After earning her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Macalester College, she pursued graduate education at the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University, where she graduated with a 4.0 while surviving domestic violence—a juxtaposition that would later inform her revolutionary understanding of how trauma enhances rather than compromises analytical capacity.

It is this reframing—from victim to researcher, from setback to insight—that defines Ohenewah’s approach toward everything. When she finally entered Cornell Law School at 26, she brought something that many of her other classmates could not: the wisdom that comes from having your world shattered and rebuilt.

“I discovered that my ‘nontraditional’ background was not a deficit to overcome but an analytical advantage to leverage,” she explains. “While others memorized case law, I understood the human stories behind every legal principle because I had lived them.”

When Failure Becomes Data

Even success at Cornell Law did not guarantee a smooth path. Ohenewah’s time as an Associate at McGuireWoods LLP, while incredibly positive and invaluable, taught her that traditional legal practice often fails to harness the full spectrum of human intelligence. When life then presented her with more curve balls that provided her even more reason to give up, Ohenewah embraced a different mindset else entirely.

“I learned that resilience is not merely about bouncing back—it is about using setbacks as data points for insurmountable growth and original thought,” she says. “Those failures taught me that traditional metrics often miss the qualities that actually make someone an effective advocate."

Teaching simultaneously at three universities—Iona University, Hofstra University, and St. Paul's School of Nursing—became her laboratory for testing a radical hypothesis: what if emotion is not the enemy of legal reasoning but its foundation? What if the people most qualified to practice law are those who understand injustice from lived experience?

The Birth of Revolutionary Frameworks

These questions led to Ohenewah developing intellectual frameworks that she hopes will reshape conversations in legal education. Ohenewah’s founding of Emotional Jurisprudence proves that emotion is logic rather than its opposite. Ohenewah’s coining of Retributive Empathy integrates compassion and forgiveness with punishment and accountability in justice systems. Ohenewah’s signature method––the Ohenewah Method––transforms how future advocates are educated.

Through her digital platforms, Power Pro Se and Woman Chief, Ohenewah demonstrates that rigorous intellectual work and creative expression emerge from the same source: authentic human experience.

From Theory to Systematic Change

But for Ohenewah, frameworks without action remain academic exercises. The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation emerged from her own simple recognition: millions of adults possess the problem-solving skills, emotional intelligence, and community connections that make exceptional lawyers, yet society has never encouraged that law school was for them.

ETF therefore awakens legal potential in nontraditional professionals through speaking tours, cultural dialogue, and systematic support rather than traditional research papers that few people read.

“I do not see the Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation as another one of professional achievements, no. The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation is the systematic application of every piece of knowledge I have amassed about personal evolution, resilience, and the potential that emerges when we expand our definition of who belongs in positions of power. This Foundation is the mark of my arrival into becoming myself. And I am proud of her.”

Ancestral Wisdom Meets Modern Innovation

Ohenewah draws inspiration from ancestral wisdom that guides both her personal philosophy and institutional vision. “A sacred ancestor taught me: When you answer to what you are not, you become what you are not,” she explains. “ETF exists to help individuals answer to what they are: brilliant advocates, innovative minds, and exactly the kind of lawyers our broader public desperately needs.”

This philosophy permeates Ohenewah’s teaching methodology, where she helps students to recognize that their life experience is not merely preparation for legal practice, it is legal practice.

“I love teaching. It fuels me. However, more and more, I am recognizing that my goal has never been to teach. It has always been to enable my students to feel comfortable confronting and trusting their own minds. To recognize their own capacities. And more than this: to cherish their own power. ETF is doing this now.”

Redefining Legal Qualifications

As legal education grapples with declining bar passage rates, mental health crises, and questions about accessibility, Ohenewah's approach offers a radical alternative: instead of fixing students to fit an outdated system, transform the system to harness the full spectrum of human intelligence.

Through the Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation, Ohenewah is proving that the most qualified future lawyers might already be among us. They just haven’t been called into the profession––until now.