Establish legal clinics in Ghanaian law schools – Prof. Frimpong Oppong
Additionally, he asked that regulatory barriers against the establishment and operation of such clinics should be removed.
Professor Richard Frimpong Oppong, a law professor at the California Western School of Law and a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, has called for the creation of legal clinics within law schools In Ghana.
Additionally, he asked that regulatory barriers against the establishment and operation of such clinics should be removed.
He argued that the structure and content of legal education in Ghana has remained predominantly unchanged since the 1960’s. Among such he said included the failure to incorporate trends of interdisciplinary legal education, experiential learning, and clinical legal education.
“Clinical legal education provides the practical training that is necessary for all law students to succeed in practice. Furthermore, it provides much-needed legal services to the poor, especially against the background of weak legal aid infrastructure, as discussed in the first lecture,” he said.
“The importance of clinical legal education has been recognised by Ghanaian scholars, namely, Frimpong, Manteaw, Morhe, Owusu-Dapaa, and Tufuor. In its 2011 Report, the Constitutional Review Commission called on law schools to instil a culture of legal aid in students. This is the culture that would be developed by working at legal clinics. More recently, in 2019, a Taskforce recommended that the Legal Aid Commission encourage and support the establishment of legal aid centres in law faculties across the country,” he stated in his lecture.
He was speaking on the second day of the 55th series of the JB Danquah memorial lecture on the theme ‘Digitalisation and the Future of the Ghana Legal System’, held at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in Accra.
These arguments aren’t far fetched. During Asaase Radio’s 2021 TAG series on the state of legal education in Ghana, Dr. Clement Akapame, a senior law lecturer at the GIMPA School of Law shared similar points of view.
He also noted that legal education needed to innovate in terms of teaching methods.
Professor Frimpong Oppong further oulined startegies for the funding of such clinics.
He proposed that legal clinics could be funded from revenue generated by the interest on lawyers trust accounts, as done in other countries.
“This is how clinics are partly funded in some countries.”
