Authorities of the Nigerian Law School (NLS), yesterday, re­leased results of the
August/September 2016 final Bar examinations with 24 candidates making the First Class Grade.
In a statement issued yesterday and signed by the Director-General of the Law School, Mr. Olanrewaju Onadeko (SAN), the result shows that 17.8 per cent of the students who sat in the last examinations failed and will not be called to Bar this November.
The figure represents 980 students out of 5,517 who participated in the examination.
According to the statement, 4,178 of the candidates passed the examination without any conditions while 359 of them had con­ditional passes, with 24 candidates graduat­ing with the First Class grade.
That means 75 per cent of the candidates passed without condi­tions, while 6.5 per cent had conditional passes.
A similar examina­tion conducted in April recorded 23.6 per cent failure rate, as 709 can­didates out of 3,056 of them who sat for that batch of the final examination from the NLS, did not make the pass mark.
Potential candidates to the Bar must sit and pass the final examina­tion by the school, while complying with other provisions of the Legal Practitioners Act to be qualified for the call to bar.
According to Section 4 of the Act, candidates must meet all other re­quirements to qualify before they can be al­lowed to partake in the exercise.
Section 4 (2) of the Act implies that the 359 candidates with condi­tional passes cannot rely solely on their kind of result to make it to bar.
Information provided by the school states that after concluding their study at the Nigerian Law School, success­ful candidates are given their certificates by council. They are later called to bar by the Body of Benchers, subject to the provisions of the Le­gal Practitioners Act.
The Council of Legal Education is the regula­tory body for the Nige­rian Law School, which must be attended by persons willing to prac­tice law in Nigeria.
It also determines the steps to be taken by per­sons who have obtained a university degree in Law from a foreign in­stitution and are willing to practice as lawyers in Nigeria.