The time has come for our own law school

Jan 17, 2015 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Leadership must lead. I have been following with incredibility the reports of Attorney General Anil Nandlall bearing his position on the UG ‘Top 25’ arrangement with Hugh Wooding Law School (HWLS) for 2015.
Last year this time the Council of Legal Education (CLE) was about to dismantle permanently the Top 25 arrangement upon its expiration. The CLE ultimately voted not to renew the arrangement but in June an ad hoc arrangement emerged: 25 nationals, plus 10 foreigners.
Within the last decade the Department of Law has not had 10 foreigners at any given time pursuing the LLB. The arrangement is now ‘ad hoc’ in the sense that it seems year to year with each final year batch at UG fighting for entry into HWLS. This is utterly unacceptable.
It would seem that one year later no real work was done towards a long term solution which among other things takes a psychological toll on our students. The AG seems satisfied with the new impromptu regime when the times demand a bold and innovated retooling of our law programme from undergraduate to postgraduate and beyond.
A comment attributed to the AG reads, “I do not find the idea of [HWLS/CLE] rejecting UG’s students conceivable”. How this is not conceivable when this is exactly what happened last year while the AG was a member of the CLE? How is this inconceivable when this rejection of our students is exactly what transpired with the graduating class of 1996 and subsequent years?
What is bewildering to me is that our AG is not alien to the plight of law students, himself having studied law at UG and HWLS, graduating from the latter in 1998. The AG must remember the 1996 students who sued the law school in an action in Trinidad, but who lost on a preliminary point. Ultimately twenty students gained admittance.
It is to our great shame that seventeen years after the AG completed his Legal Education Certificate under those circumstances, those same conditions persist under his watch. Leadership is not saying things cannot be done; leadership is about making things happen.
The time has come for our own law school. But the AG has a chief argument that runs, ‘Our own law school will lead to a saturation of the local market.’ It is strange that all the countries in the region with law schools don’t hold the same view.
The 1996 Review Committee of the Council of Legal Education issued a report, ‘The Barnett Report’; prima facie it’s the culmination of the work a committee established in 1991 and a 1992 Interim Report including a review of subsequent developments leading up to 1996. The Report showed the ratio of practicing lawyers to population: Bahamas 350 lawyers – 1:782 population; T&T 550 lawyers in private practice – 1:2,364; Jamaica 1000 lawyers in private practice – 1:2,600. These countries are all where law schools are based. Guyana, 169 lawyers in private practice – 1:4,408 of the population. I doubt these figures have changed radically.
We should have an update on this “shortly” as CARICOM undertook in 2014 a review of the state of legal education in the region. The Barnett Report took five years to produce, nineteen years later not much seems to have changed, besides the fact that Caricom has been sitting on this document. Statistically speaking, another report should be ready by 2019, which will basically regurgitate what we already know, thanks to the reality of current final year law students and the last batch.
Trinidad clearly isn’t worried about saturation of its local market, the Minister of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education Fazal Karim in June 2014 declaring: “There can never be too many lawyers in T&T.”
Here is why. At the time Karim was speaking, five classes were graduating from the undergraduate laws programme in T&T and 8,039 people were enrolled. T&T government recognizing its citizens’ appetite for learning the law entered into an arrangement with the University of London for distance learning. In 2014 of the 4,000 people doing long distance learning with the University of London in the Caricom region, 3,000 of them were from T&T.
Additionally, in 2014 UWI, St. Augustine unveiled its plans for “a University Town” at Debe. The Faculty of Law is just one of the six faculties that will be represented at the Campus, expanding its law faculty which will have a signature building.
But the AG alone is not to be blamed for the state of our law programme from UG to UWI. Where is our Vice-Chancellor Jacob Opadeyi on this issue? And where is the Head of Department Sheldon McDonald?
On June 18, 2014 UG’s Dean of the Faculty of Social Science Dr. Paloma Mohamed sent the HOD-Law a missive, among other things, stating, “The Faculty…in the face of negotiations for a new agreement, cognizant of the reality of diminishing space in the region’s existing law schools and the tenuousness in which this could place our future students, wishes to support the call of Prof. Pollard made this morning at Faculty Board and the past work of Prof. James, for a law school in Guyana. Please take whatever possible, appropriate and resolute steps necessary to ensure this becomes a reality”.
What has happened since then?
Sherod Avery Duncan
Legal Education Reform Advocate

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