Remarks of His Lordship Justice Kweku T. Ackaah-Boafo
Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana
13th Jurists’ Confab, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Coast
25 June 2026
The Dean and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law, my Lords and Lady Justices of the Superior Courts, the President and officers of the Ghana Bar Association, distinguished members of the academy, learned colleagues, and the students who fill this hall and who are, in the end, the reason we have gathered, I am grateful for the invitation and honoured to stand before you.
I have spent a good part of my life looking at the same people from two different distances.
In the lecture hall at the Ghana School of Law I meet them at the beginning, when they are anxious and eager and not yet certain of themselves, carrying their questions and their hope that they have chosen well. I watch them wrestle with a problem question, find their footing, and begin to sound like the lawyers they will become. Some years later I see a number of them again, this time at the bar, robed and rising to address the court, and in the better moments I can hear in their argument the very thing we were trying to build all those terms ago.
Legal education in Ghana presently occupies a critical and transformative juncture in its development. For several decades, access to professional legal training has been regulated through a framework consistently justified on the grounds of maintaining academic standards, preserving professional integrity, and ensuring quality assurance within the legal profession. Notwithstanding these objectives, the same framework has, in the view of many aspiring legal practitioners, become emblematic of exclusion, institutional opacity, elitism, and the chronic scarcity of opportunities for professional legal training. Consequently, the tension between expanding access to legal education and preserving professional standards has emerged as one of the most contentious and constitutionally significant issues within Ghana’s educational and legal landscape.
The debate has been shaped by a succession of controversies, including the highly contested entrance examinations administered by the Ghana School of Law, student protests, judicial interventions[1], and, more recently, legislative reforms introduced under the Legal Education Act, 2026[2]. Yet, notwithstanding these developments, the fundamental question remains unresolved: who is entitled to pursue legal practice in Ghana, and upon what criteria should such entitlement be determined? Put differently, should legal education be regarded as a privilege available only to a limited segment of society, or as a vital democratic instrument through which access to justice and the rule of law are strengthened?
This discourse seeks to interrogate the widely accepted assumption that the objectives of broadening access to legal education and maintaining professional excellence are inherently incompatible. Must Ghana invariably choose between increased enrolment and the preservation of quality, or has the debate been framed within an unduly restrictive paradigm? Beneath the public controversy surrounding admission quotas and entry requirements lies a more profound inquiry into the adequacy of existing institutional arrangements, the demands of social justice, the nature of professional identity, and the evolving role of legal practitioners within an increasingly complex and dynamic society.
From both academic and professional perspectives, the issue demands a candid and principled examination. A legal profession that remains inaccessible to significant segments of the population risks perpetuating systemic inequalities and alienating itself from the very communities whose rights and interests it is entrusted to protect. Conversely, a profession that compromises rigour in the pursuit of expanded access risks undermining public confidence in the administration of justice and the competence of those admitted to practice. The central challenge, therefore, is not whether standards ought to be maintained, but rather what standards are appropriate, whose interests such standards serve, and whether existing admission structures genuinely assess merit and competence or merely function as mechanisms for rationing opportunity.
Bridging the distance between the two encounters I positioned at the beginning of this talk is the role of a legal education, and it is the subject you have asked me to consider this morning. I come to it neither as a regulator who must defend a policy nor as a guardian of a guild who must protect its membership. I come to it as someone who has watched this pipeline from both of its ends, who has seen what arrives at the beginning and what leaves at the end, and who has had cause to think a great deal about the journey in between.
The Chief Justice has spoken recently of this as a moment of transition, and he is right. We are living through the most significant change to the making of lawyers in this country since the Ghana School of Law was founded in 1958, at the dawn of postcolonial statehood. The Legal Education Act of 2026 has rearranged the architecture of the profession, and it has done so while many of us were still debating whether it should. This is a fitting time, then, to ask calmly and without taking sides too quickly, “what exactly we have done”?
You have framed the theme as ACCESS versus STANDARDS, and it is a fair framing, because that is how the public argument has run for years. I want to suggest to you, by the time I sit down, that the small word in the middle of that phrase, the word versus, may be the part we have most misunderstood.
Let me begin where honesty requires us to begin, which is with the system we have just left behind and with the genuine injustice it had come to embody.
For decades the path was straightforward to describe and painful to walk. A student completed a four or three year degree in law, having met every academic requirement the universities set. That student then sat an entrance examination, and only those who passed were admitted to the Ghana School of Law to take the professional course that led to the bar. The structure was simple, and its consequences were anything but.
Year after year, capable graduates who had done everything asked of them found themselves outside the door. They had the degree, they had the determination, and they had nothing to show for it but a result that told them to try again the following year, and sometimes the year after that. A generation of young men and women watched their years pass in waiting, and the cost of that wait fell hardest on those who had no family wealth to cushion it. In 2019 the students themselves petitioned for change, raising questions about the transparency of the examination and the scarcity of the seats[3], and those questions never received an answer that satisfied anyone.
Those who could afford it found another way out, and the way out led across our borders. Year upon year, Ghanaians who could not pass the gate at home took themselves to the Gambia, to Nigeria, to Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and as far afield as India, paying in hard currency for the professional training their own country would not provide, while the nation lost money it could ill afford to lose[4]. The scale of it was not modest. In some cycles barely a quarter of those who sat the entrance examination came through it, so that in a single year close to three thousand graduates wrote the paper and only some eight hundred were admitted[5], leaving the rest to wait another year or to pack their bags.
I have taught some of the students who made it through that door, and I have thought often about the ones who did not. We should not pretend that this was a small problem or a matter of mere administration. A single national gate that admitted some and turned away many who had met every requirement was a real wrong, and a country that cares about fairness was right to be troubled by it. Whatever criticisms I am about to make of the remedy, I do not for one moment doubt the legitimacy of the grievance that produced it. The reform sought to address a real issue.
It is worth setting out plainly what the new law has done, so that we are all reasoning about the same thing rather than about our impressions of it.
The Act establishes a Council for Legal Education and Training, a dedicated body whose task is to set standards, accredit institutions, and oversee professional legal education across the country[6]. It allows accredited universities, rather than a single central school, to run the practical training course that prepares a graduate for practice[7]. It abolishes the entrance examination that for so long stood at the head of the process, and installs in its place a National Bar Examination at the end of the journey, a single qualifying assessment that every candidate must pass regardless of where they trained[8]. It separates the regulation of legal education from the regulation of the legal profession, two functions that had been bound together since 1960 and that many believed had never sat comfortably in the same hands[9]. And it preserves the Ghana School of Law in a reduced form, as a directorate within the new Council, concerned now with the post-call course and with remedial provision[10].
The shape of this design is not original to us, and that is a point in its favour. It follows the model that most of the common law world has settled upon, in which universities provide both the academic and the practical formation of lawyers, and a common examination at the exit holds everyone to the same standard whatever institution they passed through[11]. The examination, rather than a scarce admission, becomes the place where quality is guarded. There is real wisdom in that design, and we should give it its due before we test it.
Speaking of the design not original to us, but common in other common law jurisdictions, permit me to share my personal experience from Ontario, Canada. I am a member in good standing of the Law Society of Ontario, a fact I consider pertinent to mention. I completed the Bar Admission process over two decades ago[12].
At the time, there were six law schools in Ontario, a province whose geographical size is comparable to that of Ghana, albeit with a smaller population. Following the completion of my accreditation requirements through the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA) at the University of Ottawa Law School, where I undertook one academic year of studies and was deemed academically equivalent to a holder of a Canadian LL.B. degree, graduates from the various law schools proceeded to enrol in the Bar Admission Course administered by the Law Society.
I recall that the programme was conducted at three principal centres located in Ottawa, Toronto, and London, Ontario. The course commenced in May and concluded at the end of August. Its curriculum comprised several core subjects, including Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Family Law, Estates, and Professional Responsibility, among others. Each module consisted of both a lecture component and a practical component. Typically, lectures and practical exercises spanned approximately ten days, followed by two days of preparation for the examinations. In all, each module occupied roughly a two-week period.
My understanding is that the current process has evolved somewhat. Candidates are generally provided with the prescribed learning materials and are required to prepare independently for the licensing examinations. In substance, however, the objective remains similar to what is presently being contemplated here: namely, to afford all holders of an LL.B. degree the opportunity to prepare for and sit the Bar Examinations. In Ontario, upon successful completion, students undertake a ten-month period of Articles (pupillage) before being called to the Bar.
The distinguishing feature of the system is that the point of entry is broadly accessible, provided that the applicant satisfies the prescribed admission requirements. The true test lies at the point of exit. Once admitted into the process, a candidate’s progression depends largely on his or her own ability, diligence, and performance. Some successfully navigate the process and are called to the Bar; others encounter difficulties along the way and may struggle to reach the finish line to the Bar.
Here is the first question I want to put to you, and I put it as a question because I am genuinely uncertain of the answer. When we abolished the single entrance examination and opened the practical course to many universities, did we open the profession, or did we move the bottleneck from one place to many?
Consider what each accredited faculty now faces. It has a fixed number of teaching staff, a fixed amount of space, and a fixed budget, as every institution does. When more applicants arrive than it can properly train, it will do what any responsible institution must do, which is to select among them by some rubric of its own. The single gate at the head of the old system has not disappeared so much as multiplied into many smaller gates spread across the country, each with its own criteria and each turning away those it cannot accommodate.
And we should be willing to ask the harder question without flinching from it. Can anyone in this hall say honestly that every faculty now empowered to train for the bar is equipped to do it, with the staff, the library, and the courtroom-grounded teaching that the work demands? The law itself appears to concede the difficulty, because it directs each faculty to set its own admission standards subject to the Council’s approval[13], which is to acknowledge, in the statute’s own terms, that the sorting once done at a single school will now be done at many. The deeper worry is not only whom each faculty turns away, but whether those it admits will be taught by anyone equipped to teach them, and that is a question about resources that no statute can settle by decree.
I do not want to press this point further than it will honestly go, because there is real evidence on the other side, and a balanced mind has to hold it. Across the Common Law world, opening professional training to many institutions behind a shared examination has generally enlarged the professions rather than freezing them, because a system of many providers can summon investment, infrastructure, and capacity that a single central school never could. Where one institution had no mechanism to grow, a field of competing institutions has every incentive to do so. That is the optimistic case, and it has history behind it.
What gives me pause is that the optimistic case depends on conditions we have not yet secured. The countries where decentralisation expanded access also possessed the regulatory strength to police it, and our new Council is, as of this morning, an institution that exists more on paper than in practice. We have taken a problem that was visible, central, and much criticised, and converted it into one that is distributed, local, and far harder to see. A problem that is visible can be named and addressed, while a problem scattered across a dozen faculties, each making its own quiet decisions about whom to admit, can grow for years before anyone notices that it has grown.
There is a deeper question beneath the question of the gate, and it is the one my years in the lecture hall press upon me most insistently.
For a long time the public argument assumed one of two things about the old entrance examination, and it rarely paused to notice that the two assumptions cannot both be true. The first was that the examination tested real competence, so that those who failed it failed because they were not yet ready. The second, which animated much of the reform campaign, was that the examination was an unreliable filter whose results tracked the number of available seats rather than the ability of the candidates, so that good graduates were being failed for reasons that had nothing to do with their quality.
We need to decide which of these we believe, because the reform points in opposite directions depending on the answer. If the examination measured competence honestly and graduates were genuinely failing on the merits, then the deficiency lay upstream in the academic foundation those graduates received, and moving the professional course into those same faculties inherits the deficiency without addressing it. If instead the examination was rationing seats and disguising it as a verdict, then the new National Bar Examination carries a heavy burden of proof, because it must show that it measures something the old examination did not.
We are not without evidence on the point, and it comes from the very exodus I described earlier. The graduates who could not get through the gate at home did not, for the most part, abandon the law. They crossed into the Gambia, into Nigeria, and beyond, completed the same kind of professional training there, and a striking number of them finished at or near the top of their classes before returning home to practise. If the candidates this examination turned away could succeed elsewhere, we have to take seriously the possibility that the gate was counting seats rather than measuring ability. That alone does not settle the matter, but it shifts the weight onto the new National Bar Examination, which must now prove that it tests the competence the old gate may only have claimed to test.
Fairness at the point of entry, however, settles very little about the quality of what comes after it. I have stood at the entry point of this pipeline for many years, and I can tell you that what arrives there varies a great deal. Some who come to us are ready to be made into lawyers with relative ease. Others arrive with gaps in their foundation that no professional course, however good, can fully close in the time available. The professional course was always meant to be the stage that takes a graduate and finishes the work of making them fit to practise. When we spread that stage across institutions of uneven strength, we should be honest about the likely result, which is that the students who arrive with the largest gaps, often from the institutions with the fewest resources, will be the very ones whose professional training is also the weakest. The reform does a great deal about the venue of training and very little about the foundation that feeds it, and it is the foundation, far more than the venue, that decides the quality of a lawyer.
There is a practical form of this worry that I feel most sharply as a teacher, and it concerns who will actually stand in front of these students. The subjects that make a graduate fit to practise, the law of evidence, advocacy, civil and criminal procedure, conveyancing, and the interpretation of deeds and statutes[14], have always been carried by a small national pool of specialists, many of them sitting judges and senior practitioners who teach on top of full working lives. Spreading the practical course across many faculties multiplies the demand for those teachers without multiplying the teachers themselves. The law of evidence is the example I would put before you, because the people in this country genuinely equipped to teach it at the standard the bar requires are few enough that most of us in this room could name them between us. When every faculty must now staff that subject, and all the others beside it, we face a choice we should not pretend away, between stretching the same few hands across institutions in a way no honest timetable can sustain, and handing these subjects to people who are not yet ready to teach them, so that the standard slips at the very moment we declare we are raising it.
The new arrangement presses on this in a particular way, by moving subjects that once belonged to the professional stage down into the undergraduate degree, and the interpretation of deeds and statutes is the one I would single out[15]. There is a serious case for teaching it early, since the reading of statutes underlies almost everything a lawyer does, and many sound systems introduce it in the first degree. Yet it is a craft before it is a body of doctrine, learned by drafting real instruments and by reading real statutes against real disputes, and taught without that grounding it shrinks into a list of canons a student can recite and cannot use. Moving a subject earlier in the journey is not the same thing as teaching it better, and whether this is the right decision turns entirely on whether the faculties have among them the people who can teach it as the practical craft it is. On the evidence before us, that remains very much an open question.
If you have followed me this far, you will have noticed that every question I have raised arrives in the end at the same place, and I want to name that place clearly, because it is the heart of the matter.
The new system rests, finally, on a single examination at the exit, and that examination is asked to do two things that pull against each other. We want it generous enough to honour the promise of access, so that the young people we have admitted in larger numbers are not simply failed at the end after years of effort and expense. We also want it demanding enough to honour the promise of standards, so that those who pass it can genuinely be trusted with the affairs of others. A single instrument cannot be set to maximum generosity and maximum rigour at once, and where its pass mark falls is a choice that quietly decides which of the two promises the reform actually keeps.
We have handed that choice to a Council that has not yet drawn its first breath, and in doing so we have located the entire unresolved tension of this reform in the calibration of one examination. There is, I will grant, something genuinely better about a gate at the exit than a gate at the entrance. An entrance examination that nobody understood, sat once and decided in the dark, was a cruel kind of lottery, whereas an exit examination that is transparent in its standard, published in its expectations, and open to a candidate who wishes to sit it again is a fairer thing even when it is a hard one. The reform has at least moved the test to a place where the candidate can see it coming and prepare for it honestly, and that is worth something.
Yet I have also stood at the exit point of this pipeline, at the moment of call, and watched who is ready and who is not. The examination we are now building will carry the whole weight of that judgment for the entire profession, and it will decide, far more than the name of any university, what it means to be called to the Ghanaian bar. We should be under no illusion about how much now depends on getting that one instrument right.
I promised you at the beginning that I would return to the word versus, and this is the time I do so.
We have been arguing as though access and standards sit on opposite sides of a scale, so that every gain for one must be a loss for the other. I have come to think that this framing, which has governed the debate for years, misunderstands what standards are actually for.
It is worth asking why we insist that a lawyer be well trained at all. The honest answer has little to do with the dignity of the profession, real though that dignity is, and everything to do with the people who will one day place their lives, their liberty, their homes, and their livelihoods in that lawyer’s hands. We do it for the accused person in the dock who cannot afford seasoned counsel and must rely on whoever is assigned. We do it for the widow contesting a will she does not understand, for the trader whose entire business turns on a contract he signed without advice, and for the ordinary citizen who walks into a lawyer’s office trusting that the person across the desk knows what they are doing. Standards exist for those people, and they are the reason the whole edifice of training is worth its trouble.
Once you see standards in that light, the supposed opposition begins to dissolve. The same public is failed by a profession kept needlessly small, because too few lawyers exist to serve them and those who do are priced beyond their reach, and that public is failed again by a profession expanded without care, because it sends practitioners into the world who are not ready for the trust placed in them. Both failures land on the same heads. Access and standards turn out to be two duties owed to one and the same public, and a legal education that honours only one of them has simply chosen which group of vulnerable people it is prepared to fail.
There is a further dimension of this that I would be remiss to pass over, because it tells us whether the access we have created is real or merely numerical. Most of our people live their legal lives under customary law, which governs their land, their families, their inheritance, and their disputes, and it does so as a living system rather than a chapter in a textbook[16]. A profession that grows in number but cannot competently serve the law under which the majority of Ghanaians actually live has widened access to a profession without widening access to justice. The new framework says very little about building genuine competence in customary law, and if we mean access as a duty to the public rather than a count of lawyers, that silence is one we will have to fill.
You may reasonably ask what a judge is doing offering all of this, and whether I mean to pronounce for or against the reform. I do not, and it would be improper for me to do so from this position. The law has been passed, it answers a real grievance, and the Chief Justice has expressed his confidence in it, a confidence I share. What I can properly do, and what the Bench is well placed to do, is to name the conditions on which that confidence depends, and to hold all of us, the state included, to the conditions of our own promise.
The first condition is that we attend honestly to the academic foundation, because the reform leaves it untouched and the quality of a lawyer is largely settled there. If we will not say openly whether our law degrees are producing graduates who are ready to be trained, then we are building the new system on a foundation we have refused to inspect.
The second condition is that the National Bar Examination be transparent in its standard, rigorous in its content, and calibrated with great care, because it now carries the whole weight of quality for the profession, and because the temptation to set it loosely in the name of access, or harshly in fear of dilution, will be constant.
The third condition is that the new Council possesses both the capacity to do its work and the independence to do it well. A regulator that cannot police a dozen scattered providers will preside over a decline it cannot see, and a regulator that sits too close to the executive will struggle to make the hard and unpopular decisions that safeguarding standards sometimes demands[17].
The fourth condition is that we deliberately attend to the gaps the law has left, among them, the place of customary law in a lawyer’s competence and the scarce supply of teachers qualified to provide practical training across multiple institutions. We cannot accredit that supply into existence. We will have to build it, because not every lawyer is a law teacher, and it is a fallacy to think otherwise.
These are the terms on which the reform can succeed rather than objections to it, and naming them is the most useful service I can render this morning.
I want to end where I began, with the two distances from which I have watched the people who become our lawyers.
The law we are now living under has opened a possibility, and no law could do more than that. A statute can rearrange the architecture of legal education, but it cannot by itself make a single good lawyer. That work belongs to the people in this room, to the faculties that will train, to the Bar that will mentor, to the Bench that will watch the product of it all rise and address the court, and to the academy that will keep asking whether what we are doing is working. The reform has handed us an opportunity and a set of unanswered questions, and what becomes of both now depends on us rather than on the drafters.
When we get this right, the gain does not belong to the profession. It belongs to the people who will never attend a conference like this one, who do not read our journals or follow our debates, and who will nonetheless live for the rest of their lives with the consequences of how we choose to make lawyers. For them the difference between a well-made lawyer and a half-made one is felt in their own lives, in whether they receive justice or only its appearance, and in whether they are truly served or merely represented.
We answered a real wrong by opening the doors of this profession wider, and that was the right thing to do. The harder task, the one a statute could only begin, is to make sure that everyone who now walks through those doors is worthy of the trust that waits on the other side. That task is ours, and I have every hope that we will be equal to it.
I thank you.
[1]Asare v Attorney-General and General Legal Council (Supreme Court of Ghana, 22 June 2017), holding that the General Legal Council could not introduce new requirements for admission to the Ghana School of Law without first amending its regulations by legislative instrument. The Council’s authority over legal education derived from the Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32), section 13 (Arrangements for Legal Education) and section 14 (Power to Make Regulations).
[2]Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), assented to by President John Dramani Mahama on 11 May 2026. The Act ends the sixty-six-year monopoly of the Ghana School of Law over professional legal training and decentralises that training to accredited universities: see Dubawa Ghana, ‘Overhauling Ghana’s Legal Education: Key Highlights of Legal Education Act, 2026’ (Dubawa, May 2026).
[3]On the demonstration of 7 October 2019, in which law students protested the opacity of the entrance examination and the scarcity of places, see ‘Ghana’s Legal Education Reform: A Breakthrough Forged Through Sacrifice’ (Ghanamma, 16 May 2026).
[4]Of the thirty-eight lawyers called to the Bar of The Gambia in 2021, twenty-five, about sixty-five per cent, were Ghanaians, most of whom had been refused admission at home: ‘Full List: 65% of new lawyers called to the Gambian Bar are Ghanaians’ (GhanaWeb, 3 February 2021); ‘65% of lawyers called to Gambia Bar are Ghanaians who failed entrance exams – SRC President’ (GhanaWeb, 29 September 2021).
[5]In 2021, 790 of 2,824 candidates passed the entrance examination, about 28 per cent, with a further 499 admitted after protests and appeals; in 2019, only 128 of 1,820 passed. See ‘Over 2,000 Students Fail Ghana School of Law Entrance Exams’ (The Ghana Report, 29 September 2021); ‘Only 28% Make It’ (Legal Africa, 27 February 2025).
[6]Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), section 1 (Establishment of the Council for Legal Education and Training), section 2 (Object of the Council) and section 3 (Functions of the Council), the functions including the accreditation of institutions, the setting of standards in collaboration with the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission, and the supervision of accredited universities.
[7]Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), section 23, which prohibits an institution from offering the Law Practice Training Course unless it is accredited by the Council. The Course centres on clinical legal education and practical lawyering skills, its curriculum including Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, the Law of Evidence, Conveyancing and Drafting, Advocacy and Legal Ethics, and Law Practice Management.
[8]The Act abolishes the entrance examination formerly administered by the Independent Examinations Committee and substitutes the National Bar Examination as the common qualifying assessment, taken after the Law Practice Training Course, with resits permitted. See ‘Law Students to Train in Courts Before Bar Exam’ (News Ghana, May 2026); ‘Legal Education Reform: Assafuah questions possible return of entrance exams’ (MyJoyOnline, June 2026).
[9]Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32), section 1 (The General Legal Council), which made the Council concerned with the legal profession and, in particular, with the organisation of legal education and the upholding of standards of professional conduct; see also section 13 (Arrangements for Legal Education) and section 14 (Power to Make Regulations). The Legal Education Act, 2026 transfers the regulation of legal education to the new Council, while professional discipline remains with the General Legal Council.
[10]Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), section 77, which establishes the Ghana School of Law as a directorate of the Council, responsible for the Post-Call Law Course and remedial programmes.
[11]The model of university-based academic and practical training behind a single qualifying examination is common across the common law world, including England and Wales, Nigeria, South Africa and Canada. See ‘A Comprehensive Comparative Analysis of the Old and New Legal Education Systems in Ghana’ (ModernGhana, June 2026).
[12]Admission to practise in Ontario requires the accreditation of foreign-trained applicants by the National Committee on Accreditation, followed by the Law Society of Ontario’s licensing examinations and a period of articling, before call to the Bar.
[13]Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), section 45, which requires an institution that runs a law programme to set minimum standards for admission. On the concern that this may reintroduce an entrance examination by another name, contrary to the spirit of the reform and to Asare v Attorney-General and General Legal Council (2017), see ‘Legal Education Reform: Assafuah questions possible return of entrance exams’ (MyJoyOnline, June 2026).
[14]These subjects form the core of professional training under the new regime. The Law Practice Training Course curriculum includes the Law of Evidence, Advocacy and Legal Ethics, Civil and Criminal Procedure, and Conveyancing and Drafting: see ‘Govt announces transitional measures for LLB graduates’ (ModernGhana, June 2026).
[15]Under the transitional directives issued by the Director of Legal Education following the emergency Conference of Law Deans of 13 May 2026, graduating students undertake a one-year Pre-Bar Course delivered by the universities, covering Company Law, Commercial Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Family Law and the Interpretation of Deeds and Statutes. See ‘Legal Education Reforms: Gov’t unveils transition plan’ (Citinewsroom, June 2026); Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170), section 93 (transitional provisions).
[16]Constitution of the Republic of Ghana, 1992, article 11(1)–(3), which includes customary law among the laws of Ghana and defines it as the rules of law which by custom are applicable to particular communities in Ghana.
[17]On concerns about executive influence in the composition of the Council and heavy penalties for non-accreditation, see ‘Ghana Legal Education Reform Bill 2025 Stops Ghana School of Law Monopoly’ (PatsTune, 5 April 2026). The Act requires the Minister to issue implementing regulations within twelve months of commencement: ‘Law Students to Train in Courts Before Bar Exam’ (News Ghana, May 2026).