There Can Be An Overproduction Of Lawyers In Ghana, Trust Me

I have not familiarized myself, firsthand, with Legal Instrument (LI) 1296, but I have studiously followed most of the argument as it has filtered through the media during the course of at least the past three years (See “Kofi Bentil Kicks Against Proposed LI for Law School Admissions” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/30/18). The quaint concept that “There can never be an overproduction of lawyers,” and that “we need lawyers in every aspect of society, so we don’t know why we would make choices that will effectively constrict legal education,” is one that I simply cannot share with Mr. Kofi Bentil, the Vice-President of the IMANI-Africa think-tank.

It is quaint because it unwisely underestimates the imperative need for quality control, in much the same way that not just about anybody who attends and graduates from medical school is allowed to practice medicine, without first acquitting herself/himself creditably in the licensing or certification examination. I am pretty certain that doctors or physicians are in far greater demand in Ghanaian society than lawyers. And yet, there is an increasingly disturbing trend in which quite a remarkable percentage of the country’s professionally trained doctors are failing to find jobs within at least the first 3-to-5 years of their graduation from medical school and, one presumes, after passing their medical practice examinations and being licensed to practice their trade.

You see, what we are talking about here goes far and well beyond mere numbers; it is also even more significantly about the practical capacity of the country’s economy and labor market to absorb all the different types of professionals being steadily and relatively massively churned out of the various institutions year in and year out. If, for instance, the country’s economy is making it extremely difficult to have all our well-qualified and licensed teachers and nurses immediately employed upon graduating from nursing school or teacher-training colleges, then, trust me, there is a clear and obvious overproduction of teachers and nurses, in spite of the equally obvious fact that there is a dire need and demand for teachers and nurses throughout the country.

I also don’t see the professional or disciplinary benefit of having nearly everybody who obtains a Bachelor of Law (LLB) Degree from any of the 12 law schools in the country afforded ready access or admission to the Ghana Law School. By all means, it would not be totally out of place to start talking about professional elitism in the way and manner in which the various professional schools in the country admit prospective practitioners or students. But the rather intellectually bankrupt and promiscuous idea that there ought to be an automatic admission process based on the mere fact of a candidate’s possession of an academic degree in legal studies, is as well one that I cannot share with the likes of the Vice-President of the IMANI-Africa think-tank.

I am also fully convinced that the sheer academic acquisition of a law degree does not automatically a crackerjack lawyer make. The legal profession has a code of ethics the qualities of which are very important for the prospective applicant to the Ghana Law School to be deemed to amply or generously possess. In short, being licensed to practice law is about far more than the mere parakeet’s ability to sit for and pass examinations. It is equally about character, deportment and demeanor. This is where the interviewing part comes in. Needless to say, nearly every reputable law school in the most advanced democracies would not allow students to simply sit for examinations, pass and get in; rather, the prospective student goes through a caliber-screening process by which the character, social responsibility and morals of the applicant are assessed. This is done to meticulously weed out potential undesirables, such as racists, rapists and pedophiles and ethnic and cultural bigots. Who knows, a candidate may have even had his/her entrance examination written for him/her by an impersonator.

I also don’t see a 25-to-30-percent intake of total applicants into the Ghana Law School to be necessarily a nuclear disaster or a post-nuclear apocalypse, as some of the hardnosed free-admission advocates seem to think. At any rate, the general quality of contemporary Ghanaian education, at virtually every grade level, leaves much to be desired and is not as respected as it used to be while I was growing up. Consequently, improving the quality of public education in the country is what we ought to be talking more of and about.

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