Legal education in Ghana and the ‘250:1000’ problem: a closer scrutiny (1) by Justice Srem-Sai
Last week, some “respected” senior lawyers and law teachers moved strongly against the present regime for qualifying persons to be enrolled as barristers and solicitors in Ghana.
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They have diagnosed the problem and have prescribed a solution. The solution is that the General Legal Council should cede over its mandate to administer the professional aspect of training lawyers to the universities and to limit itself to administering bar exams only. In this article, I seek to subject their diagnosis and, consequently, the proposed solution to a closer scrutiny.
This article may not find favour with the thousands of the wonderful persons, young or old, who aspire to be enrolled as lawyers in Ghana. It will hardly bring pleasure to proprietors whose aim is to make private monies from legal education. The discussion will, however, be
Legal Education in Ghana
The Ghana School of Law is the only institution that issues Qualifying Certificate to persons to practice law in Ghana. It currently has three campuses – two in Accra and one in Kumasi. The School is controlled by the Board of Legal Education. The Board is a sub-body of the General Legal Council. The General Legal Council is the statutory body bearing the overall responsibility for organising legal education in Ghana.
The General Legal Council, by its establishing law, The Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32), is also responsible for upholding standards of lawyers’ professional conduct. By this, the body has a mandate to determine the number of persons who are enrolled at the Ghana bar.
As from January 1, 1971, no person could become a lawyer without having obtained a degree from a recognized university. Even though the type of degree is not stipulated by the law, the practice now is that a person may not be qualified to enrol as a lawyer unless she holds a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from a university recognized by the General Legal Council. Therefore, legal education almost invariably entails university education for the LL.B degree, mostly in the universities, and a subsequent practical or professional training course in the Ghana School of Law.
There was a time when the debate over whether the General Legal Council’s mandate to organise legal education in Ghana extended to cover legal education towards the attainment of law degrees, even in the academic institutions. In other words, does ‘legal education’ as used in Act 32 include education towards the attainment of an academic degree in law?
That was the time, year 2003, immediately before the Faculty of Law of University of Ghana lost the monopoly over the award of LLB degree in Ghana. This question generated soft tension between the some (who would wanted the question to be answered in the affirmative) and others, the new universities arguably led by KNUST, (who wanted the question to be answered in favour of a narrow meaning of ‘legal education’).
The question was answered: Legal education within the intendment of Act 32 means professional (rather than academic) legal education. The General Legal Council, its Board of Legal Education and its Ghana School of Law do not have any power over how the universities administer their academic law degree programs. This answer also means that the General Legal Council does not have a role to play in determining the number of LL.B. holders the universities churn out.
The ’250:1000’ Problem
It is exactly the answer to this very important question that marks the beginning of the 'problem' which engages the attention of some “respected” lawyers and law teachers last week. While the General Legal Council and its Ghana School of Law cease to have a role to play in determining how many persons are awarded LL.B. degrees from the universities, it retains the mandate to determine the number of persons who are enrolled as lawyers in Ghana.
The effect of the change is that whereas the pre-2003 regime puts the enrolment scrutiny at the entry (LL.B.) stage in the universities, the post-2003 regime places it at the exit (professional training) stage at the Ghana School of Law. In other words, the same complaints being raised today would still have been raised in the pre-2003 regime, but against the universities at the LL.B. admissions stage than against the Ghana School of Law at the qualifying certificate stage of the of legal education process.
No one, as far as my reading goes, sums up the views of the “respected” lawyers better than Prof. Stephen Kwaku Asare, a Term Professor of Accounting at the University of Florida. He writes:
“The various Law School Faculties (sic) graduate over 1,000 students with the Legum Baccalaureus (LLB) annually but the Ghana School of Law (GSL) has facilities to accommodate only 250 of them to pursue the professional law course. Most, if not everyone, who matriculate in the LLB program want the professional qualification.”
The Accounting Professor continues:
“In consequence, the students have to incur cost to take an entrance exam, attend an interview and endure all kinds of emotional distress.”
Then he proposed a solution to crown it:
“All of these can be avoided by allowing the various Law Faculties to add an extra year beyond the Legum Baccalaureus where students are trained for the professional law course and exam. The function of the GSL should then be reduced to administering the Bar Exam, which should be administered twice a year.”
Professor Asare’s proposition attracted a huge support within the blogosphere. Not surprising, it also found enormous support from the mammoth army of LL.B holders and candidates, who know very well that their passage from the wells to the bar depends on how wide the General Legal Council is willing to open the valve at the Ghana Law School.
Faulty Diagnosis
A careful reading of the proposition above would disclose that Prof. Asare and, to some extent, his army of disciples attribute the problem to inadequate “facilities” at the Ghana School of Law to accommodate or train all the thousands of LLB holders that are churned out from the universities. Indeed, want of facilities might have been a part of the problem at a point in time; but certainly not now. It is, therefore very unfortunate for one to continue to propose a solution that is based on the simple assumption that the General Legal Council is unable to provide the needed facilities. This is the beginning of the fault in the respect lawyers’ proposition.
The General Legal Council is a profession-regulating body. All professional bodies are not minded just of their duty to regulate standards of professional conduct of their members, they are also very much interested in regulating the number of persons who are allowed to practice the profession.
This is because number, as it were, has a direct effect on how the standards fare. There is a myriad of reasons why profession-regulating bodies, like the General Legal Council, would control the numbers. Suffice it to say, however, that the 250:1000 problem has more to do with the unwillingness (rather than inability) of the General Legal Council to increase the population of lawyers in the country. Thus, clearly, the problem was substantially misdiagnosed.
Faulty Solution
The cliché has always been the suggestion that the General Legal Council should deinstitutionalise the professional training aspect of legal education. In other words the General Legal Council should stop running a school and cede its professional training programs over to the universities and other institutions of training.
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This proposition, if accepted, would lead to the dissolution of the Board of Legal Education and the closure of the Ghana School of Law, since General Legal Council would have no ‘legal education’ function. It would lead to the establishment of a body, probably called, the board of legal examination instead.
The proposition, no doubt, copies the system in the United States, where persons who want to enrol at the various State bars take their professional training together with their academic law training at the universities and other training institutions. In such jurisdictions, aspiring lawyers only come into contact with the licencing authorities when they are ready to take the bar exam. Indeed this regime, too, works perfectly or even better. However, it is one thing saying that the deinstitutionalised regime works perfectly and entirely another saying that it is a solution to the 250:1000 problem.
No one could deny that all profession-regulating bodies everywhere, like the General Legal Council, do limit enrolment. Deinstitutionalised profession-regulating bodies, too, limit enrolment. It is, therefore, very curious how the 250:1000 problem, which is mainly a result of the General Legal Council’s unwillingness (rather than inability) to increase enrolment, could be resolved by merely transferring the entire legal education process to the universities.
Offloading the training program to the universities, would at best, only defer the predicaments of the lawyer-aspirant. As a matter of fact, it appears that that move is even more likely to exacerbate the plight of the law-aspirant. This is because, she will have to bear the heavy cost of having an additional year(s) of legal training, only for the General Legal Council to still slam the bar door on her by picking just 250 of her cohorts for enrolment as lawyers. While under the current arrangement, she would not incur the extra year(s)’ cost of legal education (beyond the LLB) until she is sure that she will, of course, subject to her passing the bar exams, be enrolled.
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Justice Srem-Sai is a Law Lecturer at GIMPA
Read part 2 here: Legal education in Ghana and the ‘250:1000’ problem: a closer scrutiny (2)