Antony Nicholas Allott

Antony Nicholas Allott was an English legal scholar, born on 30 June 1924 and died on 3 June 2002, who became one of the founding figures of African law as a distinct field of academic study in Britain. He joined the School of Oriental and African Studies in London as a lecturer in African law in 1948 and went on to hold the University of London's chair of Professor of African Law from 1964 to 1986, the first post of its kind. His research concentrated on the customary and colonial-era legal systems of British Africa, especially Ghana, producing Essays in African Law, with Special Reference to the Law of Ghana in 1960 and Judicial and Legal Systems in Africa in 1962, both foundational surveys of how indigenous customary law operated alongside imported common law in the region. Allott also helped found and later served as president of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, and he continued consulting work into his later career, directing the firm University Consultants from 1990. His scholarship established the systematic academic study of African customary law within British legal education, a field that had previously been treated mainly as an administrative curiosity of colonial government rather than as law in its own right.