Rigorous Admission Process to Ensure Quality – Law School Registrar

The Registrar of the Ghana School of Law, Nana Osei Bonsu, has justified the rigorous admission procedures of the School saying it is to ensure quality.

According to him, the stringent admission procedures will help the school do away with students who have not had adequate training from their respective law faculties in tertiary institutions.

“As legal educators, our mandate is to give access and also ensure quality, so we are not going to allow anybody to just come and say he is going to do law when we are not sure you have had enough training at the LLB level… There are some products from the faculties who do not meet the standard required to do law,” Nana Osei Bonsu said in a Citi News interview.

Some law students and legal practitioners are resisting the passage of the Legal Profession Regulations 2017 currently before Parliament which seeks to scrutinize entry to the law school.

The concerned groups argue that, the LI, if implemented, will prevent otherwise qualified graduates from pursuing the law program.

The proposed LI among other things, states that the General Legal Council will conduct an entrance exam for the admission of students to the school, and conduct interviews for all applicants who pass the Ghana School of Law Entrance Examination.

The General Legal Council laid the Regulations in Parliament in mid-December 2017, in response to a Supreme Court order for a clear admission procedure into the Ghana School of Law, and call to the Ghana Bar.

Protest from students

A group calling itself the Concerned Law Students had earlier submitted a petition to Parliament against the new LI, describing it as a deliberate attempt by the GLC to frustrate them, something they considered a violation of their rights.

Ken Addor Donkor, the leader of the group, said the proposed LI was an attempt to kill the dreams of law students.

Exams, interviews barred for Law School

When the Supreme Court declared the interviews unconstitutional, it said the requirements are in violation of the Legislative Instrument 1296, which gives direction for the mode of admission.

The Justices in delivering their judgment, also indicated that their order should not take retrospective effect, but should be implemented in six months, when admissions for the 2018 academic year begin.

The plaintiff, Professor Kwaku Asare, a United States-based Ghanaian lawyer, went to court in 2015, challenging the legality of the modes of admission used by the Ghana School of Law.

According to him, the number of people who were admitted into the Ghana School of Law was woefully small considering the number of people who possessed LLB.

The Ghana Law School has been criticized for being overly rigid considering that it serves 12 schools providing LLB degrees.

The current training regime limits the intake into the Ghana Law School to under 500 of the about-2000 LLB graduates annually.

In his suit, Professor Kwaku Asare prayed for a declaration that GLC’s imposition of entrance examination and interview requirements for the Professional Law Course violates Articles ll (7) 297 (d) 23, 296 (a) (b) and 18 (2) of the 1992 Constitution.

Source: Citifmonline