Council of Legal Education to establish Law School in Guyana

Last Updated on Sunday, 25 September 2022, 18:21 by Denis Chabrol

Attorney General, Anil Nandlall

The Caribbean Community’s Council of Legal Education (CLE) has approved Guyana’s request to establish a Law School here and so create more space for Guyanese as well as other citizens to become lawyers, Attorney General Anil Nandlall said Sunday.

“This request was favourably considered, and the Council made a decision to write the Government of Guyana shortly, informing of this decision and setting out the criteria and other requirements which the Government will have to satisfy,” he said in a statement. He noted that Guyana has been trying for the past 30 years to establish a Law School.

Mr Nandlall said Guyana has already told the CLE that it would provide the land and buildings to accommodate the Law School to be run by the Council.

He credited Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary Yonnette Cummings-Edwards and Attorneys-at-Law, Mr. Teni Housty and Kamal
Ramkarran, representing the Guyana Bar Association, for “ably” supporting him in presenting Guyana’s case.

The CLE meeting was held on September 16 to 17 in Barbados.

The  CLE is the lawful authority for the administering of legal professional education in the Caribbean Region. The Council
does so through its law schools, the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, Norman Manley Law School, Kingston, Jamaica, and Eugene Dupuch Law School, Nassau, Bahamas.

Under the Treaty, only the first top 25 University of Guyana law degree graduates had been allowed to pursue the Council’s Certificate in Legal Education, but there is no quota system for their counterparts from the University of the West Indies.