The Director of the Ghana School of Law, His Lordship Barima Nana Yaw Oppong, has clarified that the School is not opposed to the Attorney General Dr Dominic Ayine’s proposal to decentralise professional legal education in Ghana.
According to him, the Ghana School of Law is confident that it will remain competitive and continue to excel, even if other institutions are allowed to offer professional legal training.
This comes after the Attorney General announced plans to present a bill to Parliament aimed at ending the School’s long-standing monopoly over professional legal education. The proposed legislation would allow universities currently offering LLB programmes to also run the professional law course.
Speaking at a meeting with members of the Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee on Thursday, July 31, the Director emphasised that the School has the capacity and expertise to thrive in a more competitive legal education landscape.
He also appealed to the Committee to assist the Ghana School of Law in obtaining its own establishing statute, noting that the institution currently operates without a formal legal foundation.
“First of all, competition is good. Those universities I will call them yet to be established factories. But we have had this factory for more than 60 years, tried and tested. We have the best lecturers here, the best staff to ensure that the place is clean, and the place is well managed. People will be more interested in where they can get the best professional legal education.
“We’re urgently requesting that we have our own statue to train our students. Get us the law, and let’s compete with all the universities that the law will permit them to train professional law students.
“Then we will have a league table and we will see which university students will be the best students, and I can tell you, I’m prophesying that no other school will beat us,” he said.
