The Majority Chief Whip, Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, has said the Legal Education Bill to be passed by Parliament will “democratise legal education” and correct the “corrupted” system in the country.
He has indicated that the Bill will break the Ghana School of Law’s monopoly over professional legal training.
According to him, they started waging “this war” from about 2018, and he is confident the bill, when passed, will transform the training of legal professionals in the country.
“Intake to the law school became acrimonious, contentious, and eventually corrupted. Corrupted because evidence emerged that even persons who didn’t write law school entrance exams got admitted,” he said on Accra-based JoyNews Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
He says the new bill will give all accredited law faculties that run academic LLB programmes the license to train lawyers professionally.
The new bill, he added, will provide the opportunity for the qualification exam to be taken twice annually, allowing more students to be trained in the country.
“Let every faculty accredited to run academic LLB programs be licensed to train their own lawyers.”
“We’ll have one in January and one in July. When you pass in January, you are called to the bar in March or April. If you pass in June, you’re called in September or October,” he explained. “That way, we can have as many lawyers as we want,” he added.
He argued that every law school should be able to train lawyers, expressing the need to convert the many law faculties into law schools.
“What becomes of a law school when you can’t train lawyers?” he asked. “So we want the faculties to be converted into law schools.”
He explained that Makola, where the Ghana Law School currently exists in Accra, will become another competitor just like the other law schools and train their lawyers.
“It will no longer have the monopoly. It will admit its own students afresh, train them, and when they’re ready, they go and face the bar like everyone else.”
Mr Dafeamekpor stressed that not all those called to the bar need to be courtroom lawyers.
“That’s the erroneous impression in the minds of a lot of people,” he said. “There are more people with a law degree who are not in practice. They are in corporate law and others, and we need them.”
Ghana School of Law: Expansion of Makola campus will not lead to closure of Kumasi campus – Director
