…Justice Mensah Tells Parliament, urges decentralisation
Supreme Court nominee, Justice Philip Bright Mensah, has called for sweeping reforms in Ghana’s legal education system, advocating for accredited university law faculties to offer academic and professional legal training.
Appearing before Parliament’s Appointments Committee yesterday, Tuesday, June 17, 2025, Justice Mensah, criticised the current model, which limits professional training exclusively to the Ghana School of Law (Makola), as outdated and out of sync with the growing number of law graduates in the country.
He noted that the bottleneck facing LLB holders, seeking admission to the law school is clear evidence of the system’s shortcomings.
“Some have suggested that the courses offered at the law school should be integrated into the law faculties,” he said. “That is another way to potentially solve the problem.”
Justice Mensah, who currently serves on the Court of Appeal, pointed out that while LLB programmes, have expanded across numerous institutions, the Ghana School of Law, has failed to scale its infrastructure accordingly.
“In our time, it was only the University of Ghana offering LLB programmes. Today, many universities offer LLB, yet we haven’t expanded law school facilities proportionately,” he observed.
To ease the growing backlog, he suggested introducing a policy of prioritised admissions for LLB graduates who have long waited for entry into Makola.
“Those who have already passed their LLB and are waiting to enter law school could be granted what I call an ‘immunity’, a form of prioritisation, to enter law school, subject to how the General Legal Council implements it,” he said.
Justice Mensah, urged the General Legal Council, law school administrators, and universities to collaborate on comprehensive reforms that decentralise and democratise access to legal training.
He argued that law faculties already delivering robust academic education could, with proper oversight, also be empowered to handle the professional training component.
“If law faculties have the capacity to offer these professional courses, the responsibility falls to the General Legal Council to ensure quality assurance is applied,” he added.
