President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana has signed the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, into law, marking a historic turning point in Ghana’s legal education system and bringing an end to the Ghana School of Law’s 66-year monopoly on professional legal training in the country.
The legislation, assented to on Monday, May 11, is expected to expand access to professional legal education by allowing accredited universities and institutions to offer professional law courses, a responsibility that had for decades been reserved exclusively for the Ghana School of Law.
For years, concerns had been raised about the restrictive nature of professional legal education in Ghana, particularly the bottlenecks associated with admissions into the Ghana School of Law. Thousands of qualified LLB graduates across the country were often unable to continue their legal training due to limited spaces and the highly competitive entrance examination system.
Speaking after the assent, President Mahama stated that 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 further affirmed the dual purpose of the legislation to maintain quality while expanding access assuring stakeholders that, “So it’ll be fine.”
Under the previous system, the Ghana School of Law, since its establishment in 1958, remained the sole institution mandated to provide the Professional Law Course required for students to qualify as lawyers and be called to the Bar in Ghana. The institution’s monopoly dated back more than six decades and had repeatedly become the subject of national debate, with students, civil society organisations and legal practitioners calling for reforms to make legal education more accessible.
Critics had long argued that the arrangement bottlenecked access to legal education, with hundreds of qualified law graduates unable to secure places at the school each year. The passage and signing of the Legal Education Reform Bill, 2025, is therefore being viewed as a major breakthrough in addressing those long-standing concerns.
With the new law now in force, accredited universities that meet the required standards and receive approval from the relevant regulatory bodies will be permitted to run professional legal education programmes, effectively expanding capacity across the sector.
The reform, which campaigners and legal educators have pushed for over many years, has been hailed as a major victory for aspiring lawyers in Ghana, many of whom had previously found their professional ambitions stalled by the limited admission capacity of the Ghana School of Law.
