Dear Editor,
The Council of Legal Education recently marked its fiftieth anniversary and one of its eminent alumnus, attorney-at-law, Oscar Ramjeet, is celebrating it with a beautiful magazine that he researched and has now published online. Titled “Council of Legal Education 50th Anniversary Magazine”, it is attractive and informative. It is remarkable to me that so many of the prominent persons of the Anglophone Caribbean are graduates of the University of the West Indies law schools and licensees of the Council of Legal Education. Many of them are mentioned in the magazine.
Among the Guyanese legal aristocrats mentioned are Ashton Chase, who served as Chairman of the Council of Legal Education from 1993 to 1999; Justice Roxane George of the class of 1990; Justice Desiree Bernard; Justice Yonette Cummings-Edwards; Attorney General Anil Nandlall; and several other high serving government officials. I was fascinated to learn that all three of the current principals of the law schools of the University of the West Indies are women. Guyana’s Attorney General Anil Nandlall has a short article titled, “After 50 Golden Years: What Next?” His observation that “the 25 automatic seats at the Hugh Wooding Law School after fifty years, is woefully inadequate” should be seen as instructive, maybe even prognostic.
I was a medical undergraduate when the Norman Manley Law School was being built at the Mona Campus in Jamaica and I enjoyed some friendly interactions with a few of the first entrants to the Faculty of Law when it opened in October 1970. The sadly demised, Justice Aubrey Fraser from my home district in East Berbice, was among the law school’s early leaders and that little connection endeared the fledgling school to my own fledgling aspirations. I hope that the legal fraternity will convert Oscar’s magazine into a permanent keepsake in the form of a book, which in my mind will be a more robust article of history.
Sincerely,
Tulsi Dyal Singh, MD.
