The University of the West Indies (UWI) law curriculum has come under fire from the Chief Justice, who said that it was experiencing “intellectual attrition” and was only focused on “getting people over the bar”.
Chief-justice-slams-law-at-He has demanded that faculty members at Trinidad and Tobago’s Hugh Wooding Law School “audit” the substance of incoming LLBs (law degrees), and that candidates who have “soft options” be redirected to take alternative courses.
- Advertisement -
Chief Justice Patterson Cheltenham made the announcement, “If we’re serious, that is what we will have to do, but if we want to be the laughingstock we will continue on the path.”
“I, as Chief Justice, have to have a hard-nosed approach to what is happening up on the Hill, and what I am seeing deeply troubles me because it troubles me for the future of my country.”
Speaking before the Court of Appeal, he was representing the Government in an appeal against a judge’s ruling that the Bail Act’s Section 5A amendment was unconstitutional. The judges included Leslie Haynes, Larry Smith, Sir Elliott Mottley, and Deputy Solicitor General Marsha Lougheed.
After Smith publicly endorsed UWI, he made these remarks.
Sir Patterson expressed his “deep trouble” over the developments and said that the program was not rigorous enough.
“The bar for entry does not exist. You walk in. And that is taxpayers’ money – yours, mine and others. It is a place that suffers from intellectual attrition.”
The Chief Justice stated, “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.”
“The program lacks analytical rigor which people like myself had to go through to make it.”
Important subjects, like trust, he claimed, were becoming “marginalized,” going from packed lecture rooms to occasionally just a few pupils.
“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 noted.
