This afternoon, while the Deputy Attorney General was in court to prevent NPP Ashanti Regional Chairman Bernard Antwi Bosiako, aka Chairman Wontumi’s lawyers from securing long adjournments to delay the trial, Parliament passed the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2026.
This new Bill, when assented to by President John Mahama, revolutionises the legal education landscape in Ghana and moves us forward from a moribund system that has been run for over 6 decades.
As we await the Bill in its final form for the specific provisions passed by Parliament, here are some of its key expected reforms;
• Establishment of the Council for Legal Education and Training to succeed the functions of the Board of Legal Education of the General Legal Council in the regulation of the training of Lawyers
• Shortening the route to becoming a Lawyer from 6 years to a lesser number of years.
• Introduction of a Law Practice Training Course, which will be offered by accredited Universities to prepare eligible candidates for a National Bar Examination to become Lawyers.
• Enhanced regulatory mechanisms to improve curriculum and training standards for the training of Lawyers
• Removing the Ghana School of Law monopoly and making the Ghana School of Law a competitor institution to accredited Universities in the training of Lawyers
• Of course, with the abolishment of the Ghana School of Law monopoly comes the scrapping of dreaded Entrance Exams.
This Bill has been the brainchild of the current Attorney General, Dr Dominic Ayine.
Dr Ayine, an academic who had taught for many years and had been involved in the training of Lawyers in Ghana, had observed the troubling state of legal education and had long mooted ideas for its reform.
He had, therefore, as a matter of personal conviction and commitment to this Republic, made a promise that, when given the opportunity, he would propose radical reforms to transform the legal education landscape and respond to modern needs.
He began by making input into the NDC Manifesto on legal reforms and when the party got the opportunity to be in power put into motion the agenda for reform by galvanising stakeholder support, doing the preparatory work, personally getting involved in the legislative drafting of the Bill and taking it through all the Parliamentary stages to culminate in what has now become the new Legal Education Reform Bill.
This is more than a campaign promise fulfilled.
This development is a landmark and a seismic shift in the largely obsolete mechanism of the legal education regime, which has long been attended by barriers to access, high costs, bureaucracies, and institutional rigidities.
By removing the artificial distinction we have long maintained between the academic and professional training models, we not only do away with the annual law school admission crises but also better train Lawyers in multidisciplinary, research-focused, and curriculum-driven academic spaces.
Currently, legal education is structured to serve the needs of litigation. While that in itself may not be the problem, the over-concentration on litigation rules and procedure has led to less emphasis on other critical skills needed to better equip today’s Lawyer.
I expect that the implementation of these new reforms will move us toward a paradigm of equipping students with critical thinking, problem-solving, negotiation, and digital ecosystem-adept skills through modern pedagogical models.
By doing so, we create a legal education space where its products ultimately contribute skills and knowledge to the social, economic, and political transformation of our country while maintaining the quality, standards, and discipline that have become the allure of the profession.
Importantly, in the next few years, Ghana will have many more lawyers to support both the economic and social expansion it intends to pursue, thanks to the vision and industry of Dr Dominic Akuritinga Ayine.
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The writer, Benjamin Apha Aidoo, is a lawyer and a communications practitioner
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com