Law school teaches you to analyze contracts, argue cases, and navigate complex regulations. But Christine E. Ohenewah discovered a crucial gap during her time at Cornell Law and in white collar criminal defense at McGuireWoods LLP: legal education doesn’t teach you to apply that same analytical rigor to your own life. The most powerful tools in legal reasoning were being applied only to other people’s problems, never to the relationships, career decisions, and identity questions that actually determine the quality of life.
That realization led Ohenewah to found The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation (ETF), an institution designed to bridge that gap. While she continues teaching at Hofstra University, Iona University, and St. Paul’s School of Nursing, bringing legal reasoning to students in traditional academic settings, ETF represents something more radical: education that turns legal analysis inward to develop what she calls power literacy and personal authorship.
Consider how lawyers examine criminal culpability through the mens rea, the guilty mind. They dissect intent, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. They examine the gap between what someone claimed to want and what their actions reveal they actually wanted. These distinctions matter enormously in determining accountability.
Apply that framework to a failed relationship. Did you intend to hurt your partner, or were you reckless about foreseeable consequences? Did you genuinely not know your actions would cause harm, or did you avoid knowing because knowing would have required changing? Legal reasoning provides these tools, but law school never suggests using them this way.
Ohenewah’s background spans research fellowships at Harvard and Oxford, master’s degrees from Columbia and the University of Chicago, and years practicing law in Manhattan. Yet the most valuable insight from all that training came from recognizing its limitations. Traditional legal education produces excellent lawyers who can analyze any external problem with precision but often lack frameworks for understanding their own power dynamics, motivations, and patterns.
This gap isn’t accidental. Law school focuses on serving clients and navigating professional hierarchies. It doesn’t address fundamental questions that determine whether someone’s life reflects their values: What power are you claiming versus waiting to be granted? What dynamics are you unconsciously creating? When you make choices, are you responding to who you truly are or to what you think you should be?
Through ETF, Ohenewah has created programs that make legal-humanistic thinking accessible to people who will never attend law school but desperately need these analytical tools. Her Men’s Rea™ initiative demonstrates this philosophy in action, applying criminal, tort, and contract law frameworks to modern masculinity and dating culture. The program doesn’t offer behavioral scripts or easy answers. It teaches men to examine their own intent and accountability with the same rigor they might apply to evaluating a business deal.
The broader vision animating ETF is developing power literacy as a fundamental educational competency. Ohenewah argues that most people move through life unconscious of the power dynamics they’re creating, responding to scripts they never chose, becoming what they are not by failing to claim authorship of who they actually are. Power literacy enables seeing those dynamics clearly and choosing responses consciously.
“Power and purpose are not granted; they are claimed,” she teaches. For law school graduates entering prestigious firms, that often means recognizing that all the external markers of success mean nothing if you’re living someone else’s definition of achievement. For anyone navigating relationships, careers, or identity questions, it means developing the analytical tools to understand what you’re actually doing versus what you think you’re doing.
Ohenewah’s work represents deep respect for legal training’s intellectual rigor paired with recognition that traditional institutions aren’t structured to apply that rigor where it matters most. By founding ETF while maintaining teaching positions, she’s created a model that honors both paths, because the gap in education is too large for any single approach to fill.
As she continues expanding ETF and developing new programs, Ohenewah’s focus remains consistent: teaching people to think with the clarity and precision that legal training provides, but directing that thinking toward the questions that actually determine the quality of their lives. Law school gave her the tools. ETF is her answer to the question of what to do with them.
