Head of the Public Law
Department, University of Lagos, Prof. Akin Ibidapo-Obe, has called on the National Universities Commission (NUC) to make Clinical Legal Education compulsory in law faculties.
Ibidapo-Obe made the call recently in an interview with The Tide’s source in Gwagwalada, FCT.
He said making the subject compulsory for the curriculum of all law faculties would ensure its maximum impact on the Nigerian legal system.
He said that it would sensitise students to the ideas of social justice as the underpinning philosophy of counselling and create in them the spirit of community service.
The university lecturer explained that the education was aimed at converting undergraduate legal curriculum from library-based to a laboratory-based, where students would practise their skills.
According to him, the existing system of legal education is not producing enough quantity and quality of lawyers with requisite social justice, but the clinical legal education would address that.
“ It allows students to imbibe legal theory and at the same time expose practising lawyers’ skills to the world.
“ We want to build a new crop of lawyers who will be fit into their communities.
“There are several legal activities which students can champion and excel. For instance, street law, educating market women and drivers on their rights.
“ At a point of professional legal education at the law school, it may be too late to inculcate in the students the requisite professional ethnics concerning community service.
He, however, said that only 14 out of the 93 faculties of law in the country had instituted a clinical legal education programme.
The Tide’s source reports that clinical legal education is a method of imparting relevant skills to law students in their undergraduate years by exposing them to practical rather than theoretical aspect.