Preparatory work to establish Law School in Guyana to start next year

Dec 24, 2022 News

…feasibility study underway

Kaieteur News – The Government of Guyana is in the process of conducting a feasibility study on the establishment of a law school Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall, SC has said.

Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Minister, Anil Nandlall, SC

Speaking on his programme, Issues in the News, Nandlall disclosed that once that study is completed, the findings would be sent to the Council for Legal Education (CLE), which administers legal professional education at law schools in the Caribbean under the Caricom Treaty, for further action.

“We’ve gotten the green light from the Council of Legal Education to begin the preparatory work. A feasibility study is being worked on. It will be completed early next year and a report would be submitted to the Council of Legal Education,” the Attorney General stated.

The Council of Legal Education (CLE) recently approved Guyana’s request to establish a law school after approximately 30 years of applying.

Nandlall said the CLE will be setting out the criteria and other requirements which the government will have to satisfy ahead of the school’s establishment. The Attorney General had said that government has informed the CLE that it will provide the land and buildings to house the school.

The CLE is the lawful authority for the administering of legal professional education in the Caribbean region. The Council does so through its law schools, the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, Norman Manley Law School, Kingston, Jamaica, and Eugene Dupuch Law School, Nassau, Bahamas.

Under the Treaty, only the first top 25 University of Guyana (UG) law degree graduates are allowed to pursue the Council’s Legal Education Certificate (LEC). Earlier this year, the UG called for an increased number of law students to gain automatic admission to the Trinidad-based Hugh Wooding Law School.

A UG delegation, including its Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dr. Paloma Mohamed Martin and the head of the Department of Law, Kim Kyte-Thomas, met with the Attorney General to discuss the terms of a new agreement with officials of the University of the West Indies and the Council of Legal Education for the continued automatic admissions of UG graduates.

Following the meeting, UG issued a statement stating that it wants the number of its students admitted to the Trinidad-based law school to increase from 25 to 40 as well as “settling the number of non-Guyanese graduates of the UG Law Programme gaining entry into any of the three law schools in the Caribbean region”.