Guyanese law students will no longer have the opportunity to pursue their Legal Education Certificate (LEC) at the Hugh Wooding Law School (HWLS) in Trinidad and Tobago as the agreement with the Council of Legal Education to facilitate this arrangement comes to an end next year.
Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Basil Williams
However a law school, to be named the JOF Haynes Law School of the Americas (JHLSA), will soon be established locally to accommodate students desirous of furthering their studies in the field of law.
Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Basil Williams, on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University College of the Caribbean (UCC) and Law College of the Americas (LCA) to open a law school in Guyana, hopefully by 2018.
The undertaking will be in the form of a public private partnership, with Government holding 30 per cent interest and the private partners 70 per cent.
Regarding financing, the Attorney General said Government’s contribution will primarily be to provide the land needed for the development of the school.
The law school will be operating under the Council of Legal Education and will therefore be open to students all across the Region.
The campus will most likely be at Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown but other locations are being explored. The school is expected to accommodate up to 400 students.
The Minister guaranteed that the costs for studying at the local law school will be significantly less than what students paid at Hugh Wooding and other law schools in the Region.
It was pointed out that the cost would be incredibly cheaper given that students factored in living expenses in addition to their tuition when they were studying abroad.
The Attorney General assured that the law school will be accredited and its programme recognised throughout the Region.
Assurances were also given that the lecturers contracted will be of high standards to ensure that the students are offered quality legal education.
It is also the vision of the partners involved for the school to go beyond training students to be called to the bar.
Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana (UG), Dr Barbara Reynolds expressed hopes that the law school will broaden the horizons for students studying law.
“I think it is time that we engaged in studying other areas of the law that are so essential to our national development agenda and our regional development agenda. I hope the law school goes beyond just getting people out with an LEC to be admitted to the bar to go not just on Croal Street, Church Street, etcetera, to stand before the courts as noble as it is to do so,” she stated.
Dr Reynolds stressed that there is not sufficient study of the law from an academic perspective as opposed to a practical perspective. The UG will be working closely with the Government on this venture.
Education Minister, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, who was present during the signing of the MoU, underscored the importance of this watershed moment in the advancement of education in Guyana.
He emphasised that education is the backbone to development and if education fails, then everything else will fail.
UCC Executive Chancellor, Professor Dennis Gayle, during his remarks at the simple ceremony, alluded to the benefits Guyanese students will reap from the initiative.
“This partnership will surely help to bridge the significant gap between the demand for legal education in the Region and the provision for such education. One of the advantages of the new JOF Haynes Law School is that it will increase access to more students to have the opportunity to study given the challenge of space availability and the very long waiting list that we have observed in the provision for legal education in the Region,” he explained.
Before any physical construction gets underway, a feasibility study will have to be conducted to determine the best route of implementing this project.
