A Senior Lecturer at the Ghana School of Law, Maxwell Opoku Agyemang, is calling for the collapse of the Ghana School of Law in its current shape and form.
According to him, the current complexities associated with legal education coupled with the number of LLB holders being churned out annually who want to access professional legal education makes the current school and its system unsustainable.
Speaking at the Re: Akoto Lectures at the Ghana School of Law, Mr. Opoku Agyemang called for the creation of a council for Professional Legal Education to replace the existing Law School to administer among other things the final bar examinations
“In the interest of the country, this school cannot contain the numbers and the application even if you established multiple campuses . What is the way forward? The way forward as we have proposed is to convert this school into a council for professional legal education with departments such as accreditation department, then monitoring and evaluation , curriculum development then of course independent examination where faculties will be accredited and only those accredited institutions will have their students taking the bar examination which will be conducted by the Council of Professional examination. They will write the exam and those who pass will be called to the bar and those who do not pass will try again. If we are able to do that, I believe that the whole issue of entrance examination and the depression that is associated with it will be minimized.”
The complexities surrounding the conduct of exams at the Ghana School of Law compelled a United States-based Ghanaian lawyer, Professor Kwaku Asare to go to court to challenge the legality of the modes of admission used by the school.
The Ghana Law School has been criticized for being overly rigid considering that it serves 12 schools providing LLB degrees.
The current training regime limits the intake into the Ghana Law School to under 500 of the about-2000 LLB graduates annually.
In his suit the lawyer argued that the number of people who were admitted into the Ghana School of Law was woefully small considering the number of people who possessed LLB.
In his suit, Professor Kwaku Asare prayed for a declaration that GLC’s imposition of entrance examination and interview requirements for the Professional Law Course violates Articles ll (7) 297 (d) 23, 296 (a) (b) and 18 (2) of the 1992 Constitution.
Exams, interviews barred for Law School
The Supreme Court subsequently declared the interviews into the law school as unconstitutional and said the requirements are in violation of the Legislative Instrument 1296, which gives direction for the mode of admission.
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By: Marian Ansah & Duke Mensa Opoku/citinewsroom.com/Ghana
