President John Dramani Mahama has signed the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025 into law.
The signing of the Legal Education Bill is set to overhaul the country’s legal training framework by authorising the accreditation of additional law schools to provide professional courses.
The law aims to resolve chronic capacity issues and broaden access for aspiring legal professionals.
This comes as good news to the public as concerns had been raised about the restrictive nature of professional legal education in Ghana, particularly the bottlenecks associated with admissions into the Ghana School of Law (Makola).
Hitherto, several qualified Bachelor of Laws (LLB) graduates across the country were often unable to continue their legal training due to limited spaces and the highly competitive entrance examination system to Makola, an entrenched gatekeeper.
President John Mahama, in his remarks after signing the bill, said: “The law is to regulate legal education and ensure the highest standards in terms of legal education, but also to open up the space for more opportunity for legal education in Ghana. This particular act has been one that many aspiring lawyers have been looking up to”.
What this means
Under the previous system, the Ghana School of Law (Makola) was the sole institution mandated to provide the Professional Law Course required for students to qualify as lawyers and be called to the Bar in Ghana.
This monopoly of a system dated back more than six decades and had repeatedly become the subject of national debate, with students, civil society organisations and legal practitioners calling for reforms to make legal education more accessible.
Now, all accredited tertiary institutions such as the University of Ghana School of Law, UPSA Law School and Wisconsin International University College (WIUC) Law School, among others, can all secure accreditation to run the Professional Law Course for student to continue in same institution directly after the completion of the LLB programme.
The passage and signing of the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025 is therefore being viewed as a major breakthrough in addressing those long-standing concerns.
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