BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – The University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus has stoutly defended its law program after Chief Justice Sir Patterson Cheltenham questioned the quality of the program and the lawyers it was producing.
In response to the chief justice saying the LLB program was not rigorous enough and was “populated with a lot of super soft options to get people over the bar,” the university insisted that none of the courses offered to law students could be considered “soft.”
“The Faculty of Law at Cave Hill, the region’s longest-serving, boasts a rich tradition of excellence. It has a solid tradition of legal research and has the most extensive repository of legal resources in the region,” it added.
Speaking in court on Friday as he heard arguments in the Government’s appeal against a judge’s ruling that an amendment to the country’s Bail Act was unconstitutional, Sir Patterson said he was “afflicted” with the course options, pointing out that many potential lawyers were electing to take “soft” courses and avoid the harder ones that would make them more effective at the Bar.
He said this was troubling “for the country’s future development.”
“The Bar for entry does not exist. You walk in. It is a place that suffers from intellectual attrition.
“What I will tell you is that the LLB program is populated with a lot of super soft options to get people over the bar, to say they have an LLB,” said Sir Patterson, stepping down from the position of chief justice in May. “The program lacks analytical rigor, which people like myself had to go through to achieve this.”
He also called on the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago to “audit” the content of the LLBs coming in and send back applicants with “soft options” to do other courses.
However, in a statement on Saturday, the UWI rejected the suggestion of a diminished quality of its recent graduates due to “soft option” courses.
It said that in the earliest days of the faculty’s 54-year existence, students reading for a law degree at the UWI Cave Hill were offered what, by today’s standards of global legal education, was a limited curriculum with narrow course options. Student options are much broader today, the university noted.
“While a core curriculum of compulsory or mandatory courses remains in place for two-thirds of their three years of study, students’ choices nowadays include a range of modern law topics befitting study by a 21st-century law graduate. These include, but are not limited to, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Environmental Law, Intellectual Property Law, International Law, Global Health Law, Competition Law and Policy, Public Law, Caribbean Integration Law, and International Commercial Arbitration.
“It is our considered opinion that these are rigorous areas of study which are in keeping with modern legal education. None can be considered a soft option, and none of these options were available to graduates who entered and exited law school decades ago.”
The chief justice expressed concern that essential subjects, like the Law of Trust, were being “marginalized.”
“Everyone had to do Trust, or at least elected to do Trust, because it was a foundational course. We passed the test because of the rigorous testing that we were given,” he said of his time at university.
In response, the UWI said: “Concerning the now optional Law of Trust course, work has started on rebranding and renaming this for mandatory taking on account of its significance to legal practice.”
The university assured that as it continues its mandate to prepare the legal profession for a diversity of roles across the region and beyond, it has in place a rigorous evaluation process of its academic offerings, noting that quality assurance in higher education is a regulated process that follows international standards.
The UWI Cave Hill’s degree programs are assured through a dedicated Quality Assurance Unit, which coordinates regular Quality Assurance Reviews. Such reviews are externally led but include a senior employer’s representative. At the last Quality Assurance Review of the LLB, Mr. Patterson Cheltenham QC (now Chief Justice Sir Patterson Cheltenham) was the representative from the legal profession.
“To date, there have been four quality assessment reviews of the Faculty of Law, the last of which took place in 2015 with the three-member review team comprising Professor William Flanagan, (then) Dean, Faculty of Law, Queens’s University, Canada; Professor Gilbert Kodilinye, Professor of Property Law, UWI, Mona; and the current Chief Justice who was, at the time, a practicing attorney,” it said, adding that a fifth review process is set to get underway next month.
The UWI pledged to take the matter of quality assurance of its academic offerings and general pedagogical practices with the utmost seriousness.
“In this regard, it welcomes input from various stakeholders under appropriate circumstances, including professional bodies which benefit from its educational output,” it added.
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