ACCESS TO LEGAL EDUCATION AND PROFESSION [PART TWO]

The number of universities in Nigeria increased from one at independence in 1960 to 122 in February, 2012 and from one to 44 Faculties of Law. There was a corresponding growth in the number of legal practitioners as well as expansion in the legal profession. Access to a Faculty of Law in a University is either by direct entry without sitting an entrance examination or by sitting the University Matriculation Examination (UME). There is a Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) set up by an Act in 1978 to administer examinations for admission into tertiary institutions . Lately universities have imposed a post JAMB-examinations as a pre-condition. A legal practitioner must successfully undergo a five-year under- graduate programme at a recognised university in Nigeria and one or two-year programme (as the case may be) at the Nigerian Law School. To qualify for admission into the Nigerian Law School, a person must obtain a law degree from an approved university or a pass in the English, Irish or Scottish Bar Examination or a pass in the Solicitors’ Final Examination of Great Britain and Ireland Selection has ceased to be based of patronage but on egalitarian consideration, merit, catchment area, quota system and educationally less developed states. However, the cut-off point and pattern of distribution among the criteria for selection are not universally defined. They may well depend on whether the particular university adopts a maximalist or minimalist approach and what it considers as the trend of contemporary development and state of information and telecommunications.

Meanwhile, over 1.4million prospective candidates who, prima facie, qualify to enter the University each year, have to write a highly competitive Joint Matriculation Examination to gain admission and an average of 250,000 (or 25.0 per cent) of them eventually do so. Cumulatively, Jegede estimated that Nigeria with 98 universities had 1,196,312 (or 16.62 per cent) undergraduate enrolment while 6million (or 83.38 per cent) had no access. Even the mere fact of crossing this restrictive hurdle would not guarantee an admission into a Law Faculty but subject to the number allowed by governing authorities. Nigeria, according to the 1999 Constitution is a state based on the principles of democracy and social justice and the primary purpose of government is the security and welfare of the people. She strives not only to eradicate illiteracy and when practicable, provide free primary, secondary and university education but also to uphold and safeguard the citizen’s fundamental human rights. Furthermore, UNESCO (1993) prescribes a “full and unfettered educational opportunity, devoid of all manners of exclusion.”

Generally, the demand for the massification of higher education grows intensely and is compounded by the advent of free market economy, rapid development of ICT and increasing internationalisation. There is pressure on Law Institutions and the legal profession recognizing that it is a powerful force for global integration, mutual understanding and stability and a primary means or instrument of professionalism and of world peace. Inevitably, the urge for a university legal education anywhere anyhow was pervading. Instances abound where men whose ages are sixty or seventy years or more have enrolled in a law programme or writing GCE/SSC examination to obtain the pre-requisite entry qualification. This is suggestive that legal education and training, like any other learning is now to be regarded as a part of living, a natural consequence of living and also a lifelong process. 

CURRICULUM

The legal system and the institutions and doctrine that comprise them are deeply imbedded in the national and local cultures and these vary according from country to country but the curricula menu and the methodology of teaching law remained as were crafted by the British colonial administration. The Law programmes are designed to equip the beneficiary with knowledge of general legal principles, practice and procedure, an ability to argue, undertake legal research, hack through cases, dissecting the obiter to reach the actual decisions, and put up with alien French or Latin dogmas and maxims. Some of these may be terms of art, for which there are no ordinary or native equivalent but others have no special legal meaning and serve no purpose except to give a false sense of erudition. These, among others, however, make legal education and the legal profession tick. The names and contents of the Law programmes have been localized but individual subjects are not related to one another; their concepts, issues, philosophy and policies underlying the subject areas receive inadequate or no consideration. What the students acquire has been likened to a ‘trade school mentality with endless attention to trees at the expense of the forest’.  

In the twenty first century, transformation in our society is expected, hopefully for the better. People are bound to ask different sets of questions acquire and exhibit different sets of values, face problems that are not too similar to the past. The sphere of the functions of law has grown beyond the maintenance of the established social order. Now, law has the major task of making possible the achievement of new goals, establishing and sustaining new paths of social actions and in some cases changing the basic structure of the society in order to catch up with new and modern development. Radical changes have also taken place (and still are taking place) in law but at a much slower rate than the demographic, social and technological changes in the society. The gap is even wider with globalisation, which has brought in its tray, knowledge-based and knowledge-intensive competition in the field of legal education. It has also exposed the legal system to an awareness of the need for new varieties of programmes and to an emergent necessity to develop such international components as can meet legal world realities of both internal and external needs and demands. 

CONTINUED LEGAL EDUCATION

In theory, the Council is not only responsible for the legal education of persons seeking to become members of the profession but also for continuing legal education. There is little of an organised regular continuing post graduate legal education after graduating from the Nigerian Law School. There are no provisions for Pupilage or a term of trainee- apprentice after call. The Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and qualified universities and high institutions have postgraduate programmes and run short courses workshops, symposia seminars and conferences – both national and international and it is a matter of individual choice to attend or not. Beneficiaries bear their full cost and it can be inhibitive. The Judiciary organizes the Judges and Magistrate conferences as well as induction courses for its newly appointed members, which appear mandatory not by statute but by executive order. Lately, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has begun to organise brief uncoordinated adhoc Certificate Courses to coincide with or as part of its annual conference. It would appear that the terminal objective of the Courses is to encourage a movement away from one-man practice to the modern trend of partnership and specialisation in legal practice. The Association holds public lectures in line with international best practices.

PURPOSE OF LEGAL EDUCATION

Legal education is the process by which members of the profession acquire the skills and resources necessary for its survival and transmit this through formal and informal means to the next generation . Its aims at inculcating the skills and attributes of the modern legal practitioner – character and integrity, technical competence and excellence, communication skills, theoretically critical and developmental mind or attitude, among others. Legal education is glued to the functions of lawyers in the society. These include: 

SELF DEVELOPMENT

People have different purposes for choosing the legal profession and the legal education exists to serve each of such purposes. Legal education disposes the beneficiary to a quicker and cheaper route to employment. It enables one to assess at an early stage whether the law is a discipline to which one wishes to subject oneself. It qualifies one to practice law later Subsequent training improves ones skills acquisition, e.g. brief writing, logical reasoning, speed and accuracy, best practices and talents which may lead to promotion or advancement and self development and fulfillment. There are lawyers who are legal practitioners and those in employment that are non-legal.

Duty to Government and people

In Nigerian, legal practitioners occupy important positions in the legislative, executive and judicial arms of government. They buttress the government, help not only to create, develop, change, or even abrogate the law but also to organise and develop the society.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

Lawyers are products of the legal education, and are social engineers, protective, supportive and sometimes revolutionary, facilitating the transfer of law from country to country among different families from different forms of political, socio-economic and legal Order. Before independence, the major concern of government was maintenance of law and order in a system that was based primarily on patronage and rampart with corruption. After independence, there were added more complex problems of the development of economic infrastructure, production and distribution of essential goods and services like staple foods, post and telecommunication services, power and energy, transportation, education and health. Today, globalisation has shrunk the world borders; interactions have further expanded to social issues of human rights and the environmental concerns, higher expectations of need satisfaction, productivity improvement in both the public and private sectors of economy and general improvement in line with international specifications and standards.

The focus of the legal order and legal education has, in the main, been on the institution and its object of study has emphasised substantive and procedural law and rules and how to use them to solve what were perceived as the legal problems with little or no reference to the prevailing social order. This distinctiveness and separateness of the legal system is no longer sustainable, but it is there, unaddressed by the legal education process and emitting consequences that are at variance with other critical or analytical thoughts, and assessment and the values which the legal profession reflects and supports. Legal education has remained what it has been whereas the functions of the lawyer have shifted posts and issues have arisen which the existing curriculum could not have anticipated or addressed. There is a need for a broader view of an authentic and stable ideology for development, political, economic and social disaffection; secularism and legal order, autochthony of legal education and impact of globalisation. Legal education and training must respond to the varied socio-economic needs, the impact of technological advancement, automation, computerisation and storage of information coupled with the high rate of improvement and sophistication and their implications for human rights, gainful employment, and the environment, among others. 

The delivery of legal services at the outset of the 21st century looks different from the way things were and individuals, small scale businesses and organisations now resort to legal practitioners as a matter of course. It is arguable whether such an increasing demand of legal and advice services is an index of an unhealthy conflictual society or a healthy rights-conscious society. However it is obvious that there is a quest for Social order, change, and development through law and the legal education curriculum should advance the society’s economic and political life that reflects people’s wishes and desires. An appropriate legal education curriculum therefore should be capable of serving the ends of social justice and the needs of the lawyer in the face of the problems of modern techno-structure and the future.

Both the National Universities Commission and the Council of Legal Education have imposed on the legal education system certain prescribed Minimum Academic Standards, a group of compulsory core law and non-law courses. This outcome oriented approach tends to provide some measure of harmony. Apart from ensuring that the prescribed courses are offered, there is no assurance that the outcomes of teaching those courses as conceived by the regulating authorities are being achieved.