Legal Practitioner, Kwaku Asare has chided the General Legal Council (GLC) for failing to ensure the admission of some 499 candidates who passed the 2021 Ghana School of Law entrance exam.
Admission to the Ghana School of Law for professional legal education requires that successful candidates obtain a minimum rank of 50% during the entrance exam.
The 499 students were however denied admission, despite allegedly attaining the required 50% pass mark in the exam.
Speaking on Citi TV’s Point of View, Mr. Asare took on the members of the Council for failing to address the anomaly.
Apart from this situation, only 28 percent of the candidates gained entrance to the Ghana School of Law this year [2021].
Mr. Asare posited that the Council’s indifference over these developments signifies its desire for the monopolization of legal education in Ghana to continue.
“Four of the most senior Supreme Court justices sit on the General Legal Council and it is frightening to me that these four cannot understand that Article 25 (2) says you cannot have a monopoly. They cannot understand that you cannot issue administrative fiats to undo regulations… Only a monopolist that is convinced that the powers be cannot touch it can afford to do such a thing year after year. This is the sixth year that such unjust, capricious, arbitrary, unconstitutional, unethical practice has been allowed to go on..”
Mr. Asare believes this monopolistic system in legal education had largely contributed to limitations in pursuing a legal career in Ghana.
“The essence of the problem is that we have created a monopolist provider of professional law courses. Monopolists tend to restrict output. They do not care so much about quality, and they destroy social welfare, and that is exactly what is going on.”
“The Ghana School of Law is a monopoly and as economic theory predicts, it restricts output. It extracts rent from the students. It has no incentive to be productive and satisfy consumers, and it has destroyed social welfare from 2015 when I first noticed the problem till now.”
790 out of 2,824 candidates passed the exam organized earlier this year.
The pass rate is in line with previous years, except for 2020, where 1,045 students out of 2,763 passed the entrance examination.
The poor pass rate has in the past sparked calls for a reform of legal education in Ghana.
Critics have said the GLC deliberately restricts people from gaining access to legal education.
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