The Law Development Centre has expressed concern over the big number of students graduating with first class law degrees from universities across the country.
Appearing before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee where officials had gone to defend the 2024/25 national budget framework paper, the head of the bar course at LDC, Annet Karungi asked the Law Council to take interest in these degrees that she said are suspicious.
She said that whereas there are many first-class degrees during training, these clog LDC’s system due to the failure to pass numerous subjects.
“I think we have observed that the pattern in the last academic years they are really not necessarily the best, and many of them (students) actually end up clogging the system, repeating various subjects. So it is something we have shared with Law Council and we are hopeful as a regulator, they will take it up and address it at the time of regulation and accreditation of the law schools,” Karungi said.
She however denied allegations that LDC declined to admit some students, saying there is no student who paid for the current academic year for the current intake of 2023/24 and wasn’t admitted but rather, during the current intake, LDC received more than 3000 applicants and because of the limited facilities, all these students couldn’t be taken on.
“In the process of admission, we realized that something is coming up, but I believe Law Council will handle it. You find that applicants from certain Universities, almost the entire class have first class or upper second class, so we have to devise a fair method of admission and we decided to take on 60% from each University. So what we did, ranking from the first to 60% , we took on the top most from each University, the rest were admitted and given offer letters for next academic year, which is really guaranteed.”
