By: Franklin ASARE-DONKOH
A nominee from the Court of Appeal promoted to the Supreme Court (SC), by President John Dramani Mahama, Justice Kweku Tawiah Ackaah-Boafo, has cautioned against the indiscriminate expansion of institutions providing professional legal education in Ghana
Acknowledging the pressing need to expand institutions for legal education to address the shortage of lawyers in the country, the Supreme Court nominee urged a measured approach to the expansion process.
He cautioned that any efforts to increase access must be balanced with the maintenance of high standards, emphasizing that expansion should not come at the expense of quality.
The nominee made these remarks on Friday, June 20, 2025, during his vetting before Parliament’s Appointments Committee.
Justice Kwaku Tawiah Ackaah-Boafo acknowledged the ongoing national dialogue surrounding the proposal for institutions that offer LLB programmes to also run professional legal training. While welcoming the conversation, he urged caution in implementing such reforms.
“There has been a conversation that institutions that train the LLBs should be allowed to do the professional. I will be hastened to add that we need to be very careful how we do that, because if many of the LLB schools are producing candidates, the question to ask is: do they have the requisite materials and qualified lecturers to teach them?” he queried.
He further expressed concern about the low pass rate in the entrance examination to the Ghana School of Law, attributing it partly to inadequate training in some LLB institutions.
“If you produce 100 graduates, and they write the entrance exams, and you do not have 10 people passing, then there is something wrong. So yes, we should enlarge it, but we should be very careful,” Justice Ackaah-Boafo added.
Answering questions on the growing public concerns over access to legal education and the limited number of lawyers in the country, Justice Ackaah-Boafo presented data indicating that the total number of lawyers in Ghana as of May 2025 stands at around 11,000.
According to him, figures from the Ghana Bar Association show that only about 8,000 of these are practising lawyers.
“From 1962 till now, as of May 2025, I think the lawyers from 1962 to May 2025 are about 10,400 and something. In effect, lawyers in Ghana in total will be about 11,000. From the Ghana Bar Association portal, practising lawyers would be about 8,000. To that extent, there are not enough lawyers in Ghana, because if you look at our population, then you have about 2,000 people to a lawyer,” he stated.
