Justice Anin-Yeboah passionate about legal reforms - Kofi Abotsi

Ernest Kofi Abotsi, Managing Partner at Axis Legal and former Dean at the Faculty of Law, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), has indicated that the incoming Chief Justice, His Lordship Justice Anin-Yaboah is very passionate and critical about the legal reforms surrounding the training of lawyers in the country.

Speaking on Joy FM’s news analysis programme Newsfile on Saturday, Mr Abotsi who has been working closely with the Chief Justice nominee said when Justice Anin-Yeboah is eventually sworn in as the Chief Justice, the legal reforms will “see some energy”.

The current legal reforms he explained, “needs to take account of issues of transparency, thus, students must have the sense of what to expect…the reform needs to take account of the training of the faculty members (teachers) because the questions that are set in the exam appears to be out of sync [with] what is being taught".

He said the current legal reform that is being championed needs reforming because they leave law students to suffer.

Mr Abotsi noted that currently, law students do not have clarity on the exams they write, who sets the examination questions for them to write and there is no clarity on what to expect in the exams they write.

He said the exit exams that law students write before leaving the law school actually cannot be described as an exit exam but rather a progressional exam.

He said that an exit exam is a one-time exam which a student writes and passes, there is no other examination to write again before they are called to the Bar but because of political expediency, none of the stakeholders is able to point it out to the authorities.

“The law school may have outlived its jurisprudence because once you put people in a physical space, some must leave for others to come and there have been reality in the past of cases in which a certain number of students failed a particular exam and the key question was asked ‘If they do not go there can’t be any admission for the next batch to come into that space,” he stressed.

Mr Abotsi added that stakeholders should worry about the exit examination that will qualify students to be called into the Bar and not the mass failure with the entrance examination, “but if you are worried about even entering then it is a problem".

He stated further that the uncertainties at the entry point are as high as the uncertainties at the exit point because “there are cases students have written exams and have come out complaining that they were not sure whether the paper was a criminal law paper or law of evidence paper".