Parliament has passed the Legal Education Reform Bill aimed at increasing access to legal education.
The object of the Bill is to establish the Council for Legal Education and Training to regulate professional legal education in Ghana and provide the curriculum and standards for legal education.
It seeks to address issues of legal education as presented by the Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32).
According to the government, the Act 32 regime leaves professional legal education and training largely unregulated and conflates the regulation of professional legal education with the regulation of professional law practice and vests the two frameworks in one body of persons, namely the General Legal Council.
The Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, seeks to introduce legislative measures which, broadly, are aimed at increasing access to legal education while maintaining high-quality standards in learning and teaching outcomes.
To achieve this, the Bill proposes, primarily, to separate the regulation of legal education from the regulation of the legal profession while at the same time strengthening the control of the bar association over standards of legal education.
“The Bill, thus, seeks to move the professional legal education and training programme from the Ghana School of Law to the universities. To achieve this, the Bill introduces a Law Practice Training Course, which will be offered by accredited universities to prepare eligible candidates for a National Bar Examination.
“In this regard, the Law Practice Training Course will consist mainly of clinical legal education that emphasises the acquisition of practical lawyering skills over theoretical legal education. Holders of the Bachelor of Laws degree or other approved first degrees in law will be required to apply to an accredited university for admission to the Law Practice Training Course before applying to sit for the National Bar Examination.”
The Bill also seeks to establish the Council for Legal Education and Training to succeed the General Legal Council, but only in respect of the functions of the Board of Legal Education of the General Legal Council.
Story by Hajara Fuseini
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Source:
opemsuo.com