At Last, a Law School

The proposal to establish a regional law school in Guyana was first raised in 1996 under the PPP/C administration of then-President Dr. Cheddi Jagan, who had always advocated autochthonous educational institutions to deal with our realities. It was officially introduced to the Caribbean Council of Legal Education (CLE) by Guyana’s Attorney General at the time, Bernard DeSantos, SC, who was acting on direct instructions from President Jagan.
While it took nearly three decades of discussions, feasibility assessments, and council negotiations, the project reached a major milestone when the CLE formally approved it in September 2025, culminating in the recent groundbreaking ceremony at the University of Guyana’s Turkeyen Campus.
This turning of the sod for a CLE law school then, is not simply another government ceremony but evidence of something Guyanese governments have too often struggled to demonstrate: the ability to turn a good idea into a physical institution. The present initiative follows a model under which the regional Council of Legal Education will administer the school, with Guyana providing the land and building.
This is contraposition to the proposal when the APNU+AFC Government was in office and Attorney General Basil Williams raised the need for a local law school. In January 2017, he signed an MOU connected to the proposed a “JOF Haynes Law School of the Americas” and the PNC government announced that the school would be established locally. It was structured as a public-private partnership involving the Government of Guyana, the private, Jamaica-based Law College of the Americas (LCA), and the University College of the Caribbean (UCC). Later that year Williams said that the remaining work, including construction, would take about two years. Luckily no one held their breath, because here we are, a decade later, finally watching the sod being turned.
But this is not an occasion to indulge in the usual partisan exercise of pretending that one political side invented the idea and the other opposed it. The proposal as we said has been around since the 1990s and has survived successive governments, committees, negotiations, disagreements and false starts. The important question is not who gets the political credit but who finally got it moving and that is where the present Government deserves credit.
Attorney General Anil Nandlall and the Government eventually pursued a model that secured the Council’s support and placed the institution firmly within the regional legal-education framework. That distinction matters. The earlier proposal became bogged down amid questions about its relationship with the Council; the current arrangement is explicitly a Council-administered regional institution.
For a country transforming as rapidly as Guyana, this kind of institutional development is indispensable. The oil economy may be producing billions, but barrels of oil do not produce lawyers. A growing financial sector does not regulate itself. International investment agreements do not negotiate themselves. Commercial disputes do not resolve themselves. An increasingly sophisticated economy requires an increasingly sophisticated legal profession. And Guyana should be producing those lawyers here.
For years, talented young Guyanese who completed their LLB at UG faced the additional hurdle of securing admission and finding the money to complete their professional training abroad for entry to the bar. The cost of attending Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad via the twenty-five spaces allocated to Guyana became a significant barrier for many as it added considerable expense and inconvenience to what was already a demanding journey. Even Williams acknowledged the financial burden facing Guyanese students.
A law school at UG therefore is not just another building on Turkeyen campus but an investment in access, opportunity and national capacity which signals something larger about the Government’s development philosophy. The test of a government is not how many promises it can make. Every government can promise. Every politician can cut a ribbon in his imagination. The test is whether, years later, there is something tangible to show for those promises that will demonstrate the difference between development as rhetoric and development as reality.