The enactment of the Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170) has generated immediate and heated debate within Ghana’s legal community. Chief among the misconceptions circulating in public discourse is the assertion that the new legislation has abolished entrance examinations into professional legal training. That claim is demonstrably incorrect, and it is important that the legal profession, prospective law students, and the public understand what the law does and does not do.
For years, the Ghana School of Law stood as the sole gateway through which LLB graduates could enter professional legal practice. The consequences were staggering. Prior to 2012, Bachelor of Laws (LLB) graduates from accredited Ghanaian universities automatically qualified for direct admission into the professional law program at Makola. However, due to a massive surge in the number of law graduates and limited physical facilities at the school, the GLC introduced the entrance exam and an interview process to filter and manage admissions. The School had to create a new Campus in Kumasi to be able to absolve the numbers and later on added the GIMPA Campus and now has a UPSA Campus.
In the 2020 Law School Entrance Examination, a record 1,045 candidates passed out of 2,763 applicants. The physical campuses (Makola, Kumasi, and GIMPA) could not safely hold over a thousand new professional law students at once especially with Covid-19 social distancing protocols at the time. In this regard management of the school split the student body into three distinct lecture shifts. The triple stream structured daily timetables heavily into back-to-back morning, afternoon, and evening batches. This eliminated gaps where students sat idle on campus, ensuring the limited lecture halls were running efficiently from dawn until night.
This bottleneck was not caused by examinations themselves. It was caused by monopoly. A single institution, operating under a single quota regime, could not scale to meet the demand created by multiple law faculties graduating hundreds of students each year. This is what informed the introduction of entrance exams from 2012 till date.
What the Legal Education Act, 2026 Actually Provides
The Legal Education Act, 2026 (Act 1170) is the foundational legislation establishing the Council for Legal Education and Training, setting standards for the accreditation of institutions, and regulating the entire architecture of legal education in Ghana. A careful reading of the statute makes clear that entrance examinations are expressly preserved and institutionally authorised.
Section 45 of Act 1170, titled “Admission examination and entrance standards,” provides in the clearest terms:
“45. (1) An institution that runs a law programme shall, —
(a) subject to the approval of the Council, set uniform minimum standards for admission to assess the academic potential of a prospective law student to ensure that the student has the capacity to complete the law programme and practise law effectively; and
(b) determine the minimum standards of admission through a fair and transparent entrance examination or any other standard for the admission of a student to the law programme.”
This provision is unambiguous. Parliament has expressly required institutions to set minimum admission standards and has expressly authorised the use of entrance examinations as the mechanism for implementing those standards. The word “shall” is mandatory. Institutions are not merely permitted to conduct entrance examinations; they are required to set admission standards, and entrance examinations are the primary modality endorsed by the statute for doing so.
Section 89 defines the Law Program to include Law Practice Training.
And section 45(3) provides that:
“(3) The minimum entry requirement for admission to the professional law practice training shall be determined and published by the Council and shall be binding on all institutions.”
Reading these provisions together, the legal position is clear. The Council for Legal Education and Training is empowered to prescribe binding minimum standards for admission into Law Practice Training. Each institution must then apply those standards through fair and transparent processes including, explicitly, entrance examinations. What the new law changes is not whether examinations exist, but who holds the power to organize them.
Parliament was also careful to ensure that admission processes under the new regime remain constitutionally compliant. Section 46 of Act 1170 provides:
“46. An accredited institution shall — (a) not discriminate against an applicant for admission to a law programme on the grounds of race, gender, place of origin, colour, religion, social or economic status, language or any form of disability; and (b) formulate sound policies and procedures on admission which provide equal opportunity and prohibit discrimination.”
Section 47 additionally requires institutions to adopt special measures for persons with disability to ensure meaningful access to legal education. These provisions track the constitutional guarantees under Articles 17 and 29 of the 1992 Constitution and confirm that the new regime preserves both standards and fairness simultaneously.
Act 1170 in substance is the same as that of LI 2355 as amended by LI 2427 on Entrance Exams
The old legal regime also made provision for entrance examination. The relevant provisions on entrance examinations under the Legal Profession (Professional and Post-Call Law Course) Regulations, 2018 (LI 2355) as amended by Legal Profession (Professional and Post-Call Law Course) Regulations, 2018 (LI 2427) are principally found in Regulations 1.
Regulation 1 — Admission to the Ghana School of Law
“The Council may
- determine the number of students to be admitted to the Professional Law Course in any academic year.
- allocate a quota to a University that the Council has approved to run Bachalor of Law Programmes;
- allocate a quota to an institution that the Council has recognized to run the Professional Law Course; and
- Conduct an entrance examination for admission of students to the School
This provision is significant because it gives the General Legal Council statutory authority to regulate admissions based on institutional capacity. It forms part of the legal basis for competitive admission processes, including entrance examinations. This provision expressly incorporates entrance examinations and interviews into the statutory admission process for the Professional Law Course. Under L.I. 2355, entrance examinations were not merely an administrative practice; they were expressly recognized within the legislative framework governing admission into professional legal education.
The Statutory Foundation in Act 32 Remains Instructive
Even before Act 1170, the statutory basis for entrance examinations was firmly established in the Legal Profession Act, 1960 (Act 32). Section 13(1) of Act 32 expressly authorised the General Legal Council to make arrangements for:
“(d) regulating the admission of students to pursue courses of instruction leading to qualification as lawyers, and
(e) holding examinations which may include preliminary and intermediate examinations as well as final qualifying examinations.”
Section 14 of Act 32 further empowered the Council to make regulations concerning matters of legal education and, in particular, concerning:
“(a) the conduct of examinations, and the fees to be charged to those sitting for the examinations.”
Act 1170 builds on and reinforces this foundation. It does not repudiate it. Section 91 of Act 1170 makes consequential amendments to Act 32, repealing specific provisions that were overtaken by the new framework, but it does not disturb the underlying premise that examinations and regulatory oversight of admissions are proper features of Ghana’s legal education system. What is revoked, under section 90 of Act 1170, are Regulations 1 to 22 of the Legal Profession (Professional and Post-Call Law Course) Regulations, 2018 (L.I. 2355) the specific instrument that governed the former monopoly entrance examination process. The revocation of L.I. 2355 does not mean examinations are abolished.
The Future of Legal Education in Ghana
The public debate over entrance examinations should be reoriented. The question is not whether examinations should exist. The statute answers that question: they may and in many contexts they should. The question is whether Ghana’s legal education system is structured to deliver fair, transparent, and accessible professional training at the scale the country requires. Does the content of the training meet the challenges of the profession.
In an era in which Ghana’s universities are producing larger cohorts of law graduates than ever before, the legal profession must grapple seriously with how to maintain quality while providing meaningful access. The new Act creates the framework for that conversation. It is the beginning of a broader, more competitive, and ultimately more accountable legal education landscape in which multiple institutions must demonstrate that their graduates are fit to practise and in which the state, through the Council for Legal Education and Training, retains regulatory oversight of the entire system. Lets move on as the entrance exams is here to stay and this is not different from other countries.