I was very happy to read that Wits has scrapped the 4 year LLB.  I am all for making it easier for people to enter a profession and not throwing unnecessary obstacles in their path.  Unnecessary obstacles were requiring them to study Latin, or Afrikaans, before they became lawyers and the ANC did away with those laws in 1994 and 1995 – incidentally, both of them were subjects I did not study at University.  However, there was much to be achieved by requiring that before somebody studied law and became a lawyer, that they had to have another University degree – and that could be on any subject or any field of their choice – whether it was Arts and Humanities or becoming an engineer or a doctor or studying B.Com.  It provided, as I have written about it before on Lawblog at www.lawblog.co.za, an education for the person and did not just lead to a 22 year old law graduate who had no other background or field of expertise.  

In a recent interview on 702 Wits explained this by saying that they wanted people who entered the legal profession to have a greater philosophical understanding of law, to understand its place in society, to be more mature and to have a better grasp of ethics. I am not belittling people who have become lawyers in recent years by simply studying one law degree, but there is no doubt that they, and society would be better off if they have the benefit of having more of an education, before becoming lawyers and I think that Wits, who are probably the leading University in South Africa, have obviously seen the light first, and has made this move.  Other Universities will follow in due course.  

It is not really going to cost most people much more, either financially or in time – Wits’s own survey showed that only 30% of students who took on the 4 year LLB, without any other previous degree, were finishing it in the four years in any event, so the vast majority were taking longer than 4 years to finish that degree.  If they did a BA Law degree, they would only have to do a 2 year LLB meaning that they would get their two degrees in 5 years, only one year longer than the 4 year LLB and taking the same amount of time as 70% of students who did the 4 year LLB alone in any event.  

I think the best words of advice I ever received, when I left school, were that one of the teachers approached me and told me not to go and do a B.Com degree first, and told me that that is a qualification and that nothing beats an education and I really feel that, especially growing up in the final years of the apartheid era, that getting a BA degree at Wits University was an education for me.  I am happy that Wits has once again led the way and you can rest assured that the other major Universities, although not the smaller ones that are selling law degrees simply to make money, will follow in this regard in due course.  Wits conceded that one of the motivations was that some law firms even sent back some of their law students and asked them to study another degree before carrying on with law, whether it was an LLM or any other degree, and certainly for a long time the legal profession has been advising that although a 4 year LLB is a great way to boost huge numbers of people into the profession, which it has done, it certainly has had its drawbacks.  Many people with a 4 year LLB may turn out to be fantastic attorneys, both society and the profession as a whole will be better off with more people qualifying for a legal degree the way it used to be, and that is by getting another degree first and then obtaining the LLB.  Many people forget that in the old days you could become a lawyer without another degree and at that time the degree was called a BProc but the BProc, which is what you receive if you never got another degree first, was so underrated by employers that eventually it became a worthless degree and it was essentially relabelled as the LLB – which until then had been a post-graduate degree only.  In a way painting over the BProc with the LLB paint has clearly not put a new gloss on it for employers or for the legal profession, and it looks like we are going back to the way things were in the first place, although of course those who choose not to have a first degree will appear to be able to continue making that choice – but not if they go to the leading University in the richest province in this country.