Regulating the Gatekeepers: Constitutional Limits, Institutional Design, and the Crisis of Legal Education in Ghana

This Article argues that Ghana’s recurring legal education crisis reflects a deeper constitutional failure in the design of professional regulation. When regulatory, educational, and gatekeeping functions are institutionally conflated, discretionary scarcity emerges that courts can constrain but cannot fix. Using Ghana as a case study, the Article shows why judicial intervention— while effective at limiting unlawful discretion—cannot substitute for sound institutional design. Drawing on Supreme Court jurisprudence, legislative reform efforts, and regulatory practice, the Article proposes a constitutionally grounded blueprint for legal education reform based on functional separation, accountable accreditation, and judicially manageable discretion. The analysis offers general lessons for constitutional systems confronting professional gatekeeping, access to regulated professions, and the structural limits of courts as agents of regulatory reform.

† KPMG Professor of Accounting, Fisher School of Accounting, University of Florida;
Member, Florida Bar; Democracy and Development Fellow in Public Law and Justice, Center
for Democratic Development (CDD), Ghana.
†† Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, State University of New York (SUNY), University
at Buffalo School of Law; Senior Research Associate, Research Center for Private International
Law in Emerging Countries (RCPILEC), University of Johannesburg, South Africa; Adjunct
Lecturer, University of Ghana School of Law, Legon, Ghana.