About 20% Fail Nigerian Law School Exams

Nearly one in five students, who sat for the August/September 2016 final examinations of the Nigerian Law School (NLS), failed and will not be called to the bar, official results have shown.

The result contained in a statement signed by the Executive Director of the Nigerian Law School, Olanrewaju Anadeko, shows that 17.8 per cent of the student who sat in the last examination failed and will not be called to bar this November.

The figure represents 980 students out of 5, 517 who participated in examination.

According to the statement, 4, 178 of the candidates passed the examination without any conditions while 359 of them had conditional passes.

That means 75 per cent of the candidates passed without conditions, while 6.5 per cent had conditional passes.

A similar examination conducted in April recorded 23.6 per cent failure rate, as 709 candidates out of 3, 056 of them who sat for that batch of the final examination from the NLS, did not make the pass mark.

Potential candidates to the bar must sit and pass the final examination by the school, while complying with other provisions of the Legal Practitioners Act to be qualified for the call to bar.

According to Section 4 of the Act, candidates must meet all other requirements to qualify before they can be allowed to partake in the exercise.

Section 4 (2) of the Act implies that the 359 candidates with conditional passes cannot rely solely on their kind of result to make it to bar.

 

Information provided by the school states that after concluding their study at the Nigerian Law School, successful candidates are given their certificates by council. They are later called to bar by the Body of Benchers, subject to the provisions of the Legal Practitioners Act.

The Council of Legal Education is the regulatory body for the Nigerian Law School, which must be attended by persons willing to practice law in Nigeria.

It also determines the steps to be taken by persons who have obtained a university degree in law from a foreign institution and are willing to practice as lawyers in Nigeria.

The Nigerian law school and the Council of Legal Education were established in 1962, following the enactment of the Legal Education Act to ensure the study of the Nigerian customary law by prospective members of the bench.