Politics

Parliament urged to reform legal education

Kofi Bentil, a private legal practitioner and senior vice president of policy think tank, IMANI Africa, has expressed disappointment in the lack of reforms in the legal education system despite constant calls for a review.

“The leadership of the legal council has failed in this regard, it is very disappointing when you live in a situation like this, you will like to hope there are people who are looking out to make sure the system is the best it can be.

“We let this problem fester for years, we have to take it to the highest level to try and force some kind of change, we do not end up in the kind of catastrophe we find ourselves in,” Mr Bentil lamented.

He was among a group of lawyers who led law students to campaign for reforms last year, following the mass failure in the Bar exam. A year on, no reforms have taken place, and the Ghana School of Law has recorded yet another abysmal result in the Bar exam with this year’s results described as the worst ever recorded by the School and students have already petitioned Parliament again over the matter.

“We made appeals to Parliament, to the leadership of the law school and many other important people all of whom indicated they are going to do something about it, everybody goes to sleep, it does not look like much has been done and they will tell you something is being done about it but clearly it is not enough,” Mr Bentil pointed out.

Wilberforce Mensah, immediate past executive of the Students Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, recently noted that the high number of failures recorded in the final exams for students of the school was not the result of  lack of preparedness on the part of the students.

According to him, “the students put great deal of work into their studies, even before getting into Law School hence, cannot be accused of lack of effort however, the problem is an indication of a problem with the General Legal Council.

“The only new introduction to the system is the people setting the questions are those marking, not the lecturers, it can’t be the lecturers not teaching well, it has to do with the marking, it is not the fault of the lecturers because they teach well,” he stressed. –citinewsroom.com

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