Mahama signs legal education reform bill, breaking Ghana School of Law’s 66-year monopoly
A decades-long chapter in Ghana’s legal education history has come to a close after President John Dramani Mahama signed the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025 into law on Monday, May 11, dismantling the Ghana School of Law’s exclusive grip on professional legal training and throwing open the doors for a new era of wider access and expanded opportunity.
Addressing the nation after appending his signature to the bill, President Mahama framed the legislation as both a quality-assurance measure and a long-overdue correction to a system that had shut out far too many qualified graduates from completing their journey to the Bar.
“The law is to regulate legal education and ensure the highest standards in terms of legal education, but also to open up the space for more opportunity for legal education in Ghana. This particular act has been one that many aspiring lawyers have been looking up to,” he said.
The Ghana School of Law had held its position as the sole institution authorised to deliver the Professional Law Course — the mandatory qualification for anyone seeking to be called to the Bar in Ghana — for approximately 66 years.
That monopoly became an increasingly contentious feature of the country’s legal landscape, drawing sustained criticism from students, civil society organisations and legal practitioners who argued that the institution’s limited intake was creating an artificial bottleneck that denied talented LLB graduates a fair path into the profession.
Year after year, significant numbers of qualified graduates found themselves locked out — not for lack of academic merit, but simply because the Ghana School of Law lacked the capacity to accommodate them, and no alternative existed.
The rigorous and highly competitive entrance examination process only sharpened that frustration, fuelling a national conversation about fairness, access and the future direction of legal education in Ghana.
With the new law now in force, that conversation has found a concrete answer.
Accredited universities and institutions that satisfy the required standards and secure the necessary regulatory approvals will be permitted to design and run their own professional legal education programmes — a fundamental shift that is expected to significantly expand the pipeline of lawyers entering the profession.
The signing of the bill has been broadly welcomed as one of the most consequential reforms to Ghana’s legal education framework in generations, with many seeing it as a long-overdue act of justice for the thousands of aspiring lawyers who were denied their ambitions not by their own shortcomings, but by a system that simply could not accommodate them.
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