Legal training uncertainty as university scraps degree

A recent decision by a top South African university to discontinue the bachelor of laws degree in favour of a postgraduate qualification has raised mixed reactions. One academic called on other universities to follow suit as the current system produced "legal barbarians" but the Black Lawyers Association accused the university of "acting inappropriately".

The Council on Higher Education has been reviewing legal education in the country amid growing concern that changes to the structure of legal degrees and declining standards have compromised the quality of law graduates.

The four-year undergraduate bachelor of laws, or LLB, degree was introduced in 1997 after the promulgation of the Qualification of Legal Practitioners Amendment Act.

It was designed to broaden access to legal education among previously disadvantaged South Africans by removing one year's worth of financial costs towards becoming a lawyer. But law firms have complained about the level of preparation of the LLB graduates they recruit.

This month the University of the Witwatersrand, or Wits, announced that its four-year bachelor of laws degree would be discontinued.

From 2015, students seeking a legal career must enrol in a postgraduate LLB programme, which may take two years to complete. Their undergraduate qualifications would be either a bachelor of arts in law or a bachelor of commerce in law. Students currently enrolled in the four-year LLB degree will be allowed to complete their qualifications.

Not adequately prepared

Wits law school head Professor Vinodh Jaichand said the decision was driven by discussions with law firms and members of the Bar highlighting that the four-year undergraduate LLB did not "adequately prepare students for the legal profession" - a problem confirmed during a Southern African Law Teachers' Association conference held on campus in January.

"Many point to graduates' lack of maturity or awareness to be given stewardship of clients' affairs," he told University World News. Some firms only employed Wits graduates if they completed additional qualifications like a master of law, or LLM, degree. "The proposed postgraduate LLB will enhance their opportunities."

Underpinning his reasoning, Jaichand said that statistically only 30% of students completed the undergraduate degree in four years with a "significant number" taking five or more years to graduate. Nationally, this figure averages 25%.

Currently, only 50% of law graduates enter the profession with the rest working in civil society, international organisations, corporations or academia.

The change means students would obtain at least one degree as an admission requirement for law studies. "The rationale is that a prior degree would prepare a prospective law student on the expectations of university education with some level of literacy, numeracy and exposure to the wider issues in South Africa and beyond, that are materials in their legal understanding.

"Wits cannot be a bystander to the challenges faced by law graduates, the profession and society," Jaichand stressed.

The postgraduate degree would include additional courses in ethics, legal research and a writing course, with the former aimed at assisting future lawyers make the right decisions in morally complex issues.

"While every lawyer is trained in the same way, the issues of ethics have been assumed - indeed this is an issue of governance in our country today. We want to produce lawyers who understand their social function and duty, which has been missing because we have just been training legal technicians," Jaichand argued.

Mixed reactions

However, Black Lawyers Association President Busani Mabunda complained that Wits was "pre-empting a multi-stakeholder review process" led by the Council on Higher Education which had reached an advanced stage and was "close to an agreement on a uniform approach to training future lawyers".

Jaichand dismissed this argument, saying that the review discussions had not progressed in five years.

Law Society of South Africa CEO Nic Swart said most students did not have the requisite academic literacy or numeracy skills to complete the undergraduate LLB degree in four years.

Business Day newspaper quoted an unnamed academic saying other universities should follow the Wits decision as the current system produced "legal barbarians" who, while trained in law, were ill-equipped to translate that into understanding how lawyers functioned in relation to society and the existing "power dynamics".

But the Wits announcement caught many other South African universities off-guard and none has yet followed suit.

University of Johannesburg law faculty dean Professor Patrick O'Brien said the institution encouraged students to register for bachelor in arts or commerce degrees before enrolling for postgraduate LLBs, for the same reasons Jaichand had expressed.

While welcoming the extended programme as "better preparation for legal training", University of Pretoria law faculty deputy dean Professor Anton Kok acknowledged that the four-year undergraduate option was shorter and cheaper.

A counter was that a fair percentage of the university's LLB graduates also completed a masters as "another way of broadening their legal training".

According to the Rhodes University website, the institution offers the LLB as two, three or four-year qualifications. In their first year, all prospective LLB students register for general degrees in other faculties where they read for some non-law as well as two law courses.

Only in their second year, after obtaining "sufficient information to make a proper decision", could students decide which route they wanted to follow. "This also enables students who discover in their first year that they are not suited to a career in law, to change their study direction without forfeiting a year," the website says.

The University of Cape Town decides on its four-year undergraduate LLB students based on school-leaving results and marks in the academic literacy and quantitative literacy components of the National Benchmark Test, or NBT.

The results were used both in deciding whether to initially admit students and on whether they could embark on the four-year degree or be trained via a five-year academic development LLB programme.

The latter admits applicants whose NBT results indicate there is "a reasonable prospect" they may succeed in their studies if provided additional support. The first year of studies is taught over two years with additional support provided.

Cape Town states that this provides students who have the potential to succeed in university studies, but whose schooling did not fully prepare them for the transition from school to university, with the best possible opportunity for succeeding in LLB studies.