Africa-Press – Ghana. Professor Richard Frimpong Oppong, Professor of Law at the California Western School of Law, USA, says Ghana needs a new vision for legal education to conform to the changes in the global digital economy. He, therefore, called for a pause in the establishment of new law faculties and departments in the various universities.
Delivering the 55th J.B. Danquah Memorial Lectures organised by the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) in Accra on Tuesday, February 22, 2022, Prof. Oppong said the proliferation of law faculties and departments should also be stopped.
He said all stakeholders, including the Bar, Bench, the General Legal Council (GLC), National Accreditation Board, students and the public should be widely engaged in the review process.
“The discipline of law in Ghana needs to embrace the gradual digital turn of the law. Our law schools should pay attention to the profound changes that digitisation will bring to the country.
“We need to train our students in digital capabilities, as well as in the traditional skills that are essential to legal and non-legal careers in a digitalised future,” he said.
Prof. Oppong said currently, legal education in the country did not equip graduates with the necessary skills to practice in a digitally mediated world.
The current system, he said, was designed for a former era – the analogue age – and must be reconceptualised to integrate practice and other forms of legal work in a digital world.
“Existing regulation on legal education in Ghana impose an obligation on law schools to teach students specific content to qualify for entry into the Ghana School of Law and subsequently, to practice law.
“This prescribed degree course content, largely derived from the analogue era of the 1960s, when the Legal Profession Act, 1960 was first enacted and has not seen any significant revision. For the most part, legal education in Ghana is about teaching legal rules,” Prof. oppong noted.
He urged Law Schools to deliver some of their undergraduate and professional law courses online or at least certain aspects of them, using existing online Learning Management Systems (LMS). He said lectures could also be recorded and provided to students to listen on an LMS platform in advance of a class to save time and resources.
“By moving at least the lectures online, where students can watch the lectures at their own pace and replay those concepts they struggle with, faculty members are free to turn their class time into a forum where students can apply legal doctrines to stimulated problems with the guidance of the professor,” Prof. Oppong said.
The J. B. Danquah Memorial Lecture Series was instituted in 1968 in memory of a foundation member of the GAAS, Dr Joseph Boakye Danquah, who died in prison in February 1965.
Dr Danquah was a member of the “Big Six” who led the struggle for Ghana’s independence but was arrested and imprisoned three times; first by the colonial government in 1948 and twice by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’ first President, in 1961 and 1964.
Since 1968, the lectures had been a constant feature of the Academy’s activities. This year’s three-day lecture is on the theme: “Digitalisation and the future of the Ghana Legal System.”
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