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Parliament is due to pass the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, to expand access to professional legal education in Ghana.
The House has already adopted the report of the Constitution and Legal Affairs Committee, which earlier considered the bill and submitted its report to the House on February 3 this year.
Given the 88 clauses contained in the bill that the House needed so much time to amend, the bill was referred to the Winnowing Committee to fine-tune it.
Once the committee is done with its work and submits its report by Thursday or Friday, it will pave way for the bill's passage by Friday.
This is because the bill already enjoys a bi-partisan support from both sides, and as such they have recommended the adoption of the Constitutional and Legal Affairs’ report and its passage.
The Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Dr Dominic Ayine, presented the bill to the House on October 24, last year.
The bill, if passed, will seek 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.
To achieve those objectives, the Bill proposes to break the monopoly the Ghana School of Law (GSL) has over professional legal education and its entrance exams that has over the years, barred many from pursuing further legal training to be called to the bar.
As a remedy, the bill, if assented to by the President, will extend accreditation to other universities, including private ones, to offer professional legal programmes.
The bill introduces a Law Practice Training Course to be offered by accredited universities, which will prepare candidates for the National Bar Examination.
The Law Practice Training Course will emphasise clinical legal education and the acquisition of practical lawyering skills, rather than purely theoretical instruction.
Holders of the Bachelor of Laws degree or other approved first degrees in law will be required to gain admission to that course before qualifying to sit the National Bar Examination.
Moving the motion for the bill to be read the second time last Tuesday, Dr Ayine said the bill was in accordance with the letter and spirit of the Constitution in Article 25 to create equality of opportunity for Ghanaian citizens desirous of becoming lawyers.
He said the bill sought to clear the bottleneck associated with the monopoly of the GSL and also the so-called entrance exam that made it virtually impossible for even students who graduated with First Class from very reputable universities to get into the GSL.
As part of innovations contained in the bill, Dr Ayine said the government was introducing an accreditation programme that would make sure that it was not every mushroom bachelor of law (LLB) school that would produce lawyers who would go on to write the bar exam.
There would be accreditation and quality control to ensure that if there was a university producing LLB candidates, those candidates would have gone through a training that was either “equivalent to or better than what I went through or what the Majority Leader went through before becoming lawyers”.
“We are also introducing the National Bar Exam so that those who go through the law practice training course at the accredited universities can all write the National Bar Exam, which will be a standardised exam that will be administered by the Council for Legal Education and its Bar Examination Committee,” he said.
On the misperception that there were already too many lawyers in Ghana, the A-G firmly described such a belief as untrue.
He said, unlike in the United States of America, where the lawyer-to-citizen ratio was four lawyers to 1,000 residents, Ghana had one lawyer to 5,000 plus citizens and, therefore, denied that there was an oversupply of lawyers in Ghana.
The Majority Leader, Mahama Ayariga, argued that year after year, the issue of access to professional legal education had been a perennial problem.
He also said the House received several petitions from associations of students who had written the examination but failed to get into the law school, feeling unfairly treated.
He recalled how the General Legal Council had to carry out some reforms in the examination process with a view to introducing some level of accountability, fairness and justice in the process.
