JUDICIAL SERVICE INAUGURATES CLERKSHIP PROGRAMME

THE Judicial Service has inaugurated a clerkship programme to engage newly qualified lawyers to work with Justices of the Superior Courts.
The services that the Judicial Clerks would perform include legal research, drafting of memoranda, court opinions, proof reading and verification of references and citations.
The programme is being implemented by the Judicial Service in collaboration with the Faculties of Law of Fordham University in New York, USA and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
The engagement is initially for one year and renewable depending on a number of conditions and factors.
It is based on the clerkship system in the US courts where the lawyers engaged were selected from the best graduates from the Law School.
For a start, four of such clerks were inaugurated into office in Accra yesterday and were each given a personal computer to work with.
In his inaugural address, Mr Justice S. A. Brobbey, a justice of the Supreme Court, urged the first batch of clerks to give their best in order to improve the quality of justice delivery in the superior courts.
The Judiciary, he noted, experimented with a similar programme in the 80s but could not be sustained for a number of reasons, among which was that the judges could not vouch for the confidentiality of the clerks.
Mr Justice Brobbey said following that the judges were not prepared to take risks with the new lawyers around them as far as leaking information on judgements before they were read publicly was concerned.