I am one of those people that understand fully why the LLB has become an under-graduate degree, but I do think it is a pity.  Certainly, we needed a transformation of the legal profession in South Africa and dropping the requirement that you had a degree before doing the LLB made sense.  The problem is that it puts a lot of people out in the market who have no experience of working, no experience of life and have studied nothing else in their lives, other than a law degree.  

For those of you that are not familiar with the situation, in the old days if you just wanted to study a law degree without any other degree first, you would study a B.Proc.  Attorneys like me generally got a B.Com or a BA before their LLB and their LLB was a post-graduate degree which it no longer is.  In other words, you needed to have another degree before you could even do your LLB.  The top Universities only took those with the best marks into their LLB program and if you didn’t do well enough in your first degree you would go to another university to do your LLB.  In my years those that never made it into Wits went to RAU which is now the University of Johannesburg.  So you had to compete to get into Wits after school to do a degree in the first place and then plus or minus 1000 people who already had a degree would compete for 200 spots in the LLB program at Wits.  The B.Proc was unpopulatr though because it was seen as an inferior degree and so eventually it was scrapped and the LLB was made into a 4 year degree just like the B.Proc had always been that you could do without a previous degree.

The problem now is that there are 17 institutions in South Africa offering LLB degrees and they are obviously churning out too many students, many of them that are fairly weak – and I don’t just mean the students – I mean the Universities too.  In fact, four Universities have recently been informed by the Council of Higher Education that unless they improve their Bachelor of Law degrees that their accreditation will be removed.  The four Universities, whose degrees are being questioned are North West University, Walter Sisulu University, University of South Africa and University of the Free State. For example, the criticism of the Walter Sisulu University is that their programme at the University does not have enough adequate senior staff and that the majority of the staff members have the LLB as a highest qualification – which is not really good enough for them all to be teachers.  The report goes on to say that the teaching in law degree resources are inadequate, impacting negatively on the achievement of the intended outcomes of the qualifications.