Be innovators of Family and Succession Law- Betty Mould charges GSL students

Former Attorney-General Betty Mould-Iddrisu has delivered a compelling public lecture to students of the Ghana School of Law, challenging the next generation of lawyers to see the law not as a fixed code, but as a living system that must respond to the shifting realities of Ghanaian family life.

Speaking on the theme “When the Law is Silent: Judicial Innovation and Legal Practice in Ghana’s Family and Succession Law,” she argued that some of the most difficult legal questions in Ghana today arise not where the law is clear, but where legislation is outdated, incomplete, or simply unable to keep pace with social change.

Her message was clear: in family and succession disputes, lawyers are often called in when the statute book has run out of easy answers.

Drawing from Ghana’s plural legal system, she described family and succession law as one of the clearest arenas in which customary law, constitutional values, and statutory rules collide. She said this tension has left courts, lawyers, and families grappling with disputes over inheritance, marital property, funeral control, dependants’ rights, and the status of competing spouses in ways the law did not fully anticipate.

Mould-Iddrisu traced the challenge to the historical structure of Ghanaian family institutions, noting that patriarchal customs and inherited legal gaps have often worked against widows, children, and vulnerable dependants. In her assessment, judicial innovation has therefore become a strategic instrument for advancing fairness and constitutional equality where Parliament has not yet delivered comprehensive reform.

A major focus of the lecture was the role of the courts in developing Ghana’s marital property law. She highlighted landmark cases such as Mensah v Mensah, Quartson v Quartson, and Arthur v Arthur as turning points in recognising marriage as an economic partnership and affirming that non-financial contributions, including domestic labour and childcare, can carry legal weight in property distribution.

But she also pointed to the more recent Sarpong v Sarpong decision as evidence that the law remains unsettled. While the ruling attempted to clarify the factors courts should consider in sharing marital property, she suggested it also reopened uncertainty around what exactly counts as marital property and how equitable contribution should be measured in practice.

That uncertainty, she implied, is not merely academic. It goes directly to the heart of how lawyers advise clients, litigate estates, and protect surviving spouses from dispossession.

On intestacy, she described the Intestate Succession Law, 1985 (PNDCL 111), as a major reform that helped shield nuclear families from the harsh effects of older inheritance practices. Yet she said the law still leaves significant operational gaps, particularly around jointly occupied homes, polygamous households, and the competing claims of children from different relationships.

In one of the lecture’s most striking moments, Mould-Iddrisu used the public fallout following the death of highlife icon Daddy Lumba as a modern case study in the complexity of succession law. She said the disputes reportedly triggered by his passing illustrated the legal tension that can arise when customary, statutory, and foreign marriages intersect in a single estate.

Questions over who qualifies as a lawful spouse, who controls funeral arrangements, and who has authority over property are, she noted, not peripheral matters. In Ghana, they are often the first and fiercest fronts in succession litigation.

For young lawyers, she said, such cases are a warning and an opportunity. They show that legal practice in this area requires far more than courtroom advocacy. A family and succession lawyer must be investigator, strategist, negotiator, mediator, and, at times, crisis manager.

She urged students not to dismiss family law as a quieter corner of legal practice. On the contrary, she presented it as one of the most socially consequential and intellectually demanding fields at the Bar, with direct impact on grief-stricken families, vulnerable spouses, and children caught in conflict after death or divorce.

Her broader call was for a legal profession that is agile, humane, and reform-minded. Until legislation catches up, she suggested, the burden of bridging the gap between law and lived reality will continue to fall on judges and lawyers.