Law school development in Kenya followed independence, with the establishment of formal legal education to produce lawyers who would staff the judiciary, government service, and private legal practice in an independent state. The University of Nairobi Founding included establishment of a law faculty, which became the primary institution for legal education in Kenya. Like Medical Education Doctors, legal education required specialized faculty, library resources, and access to courts for practical experience. However, law education's lower cost compared to medical education allowed for somewhat larger cohorts of students, and the profession of law attracted many ambitious young Kenyans seeking professional status and income.
The curriculum emphasized British common law and constitutional law, reflecting Kenya's legal inheritance from colonialism. Students learned Roman Dutch law principles applied in Kenya's system, studied criminal and civil procedure, property law, and constitutional law through lecture and seminar formats. Unlike medical education's heavy reliance on teaching hospitals, legal education depended on libraries with extensive legal resources, particularly law reports and statutes. Post-independence Kenya invested in developing legal libraries that could support law student study, though these were concentrated in Nairobi and university cities.
Practical legal education occurred through a requirement for articles, an apprenticeship system where law graduates worked under supervision of practicing lawyers before being admitted to practice. This system effectively distributed practical training across the legal profession rather than requiring law schools to provide it. However, not all law graduates secured article places, and competition for good positions was intense. Rural and smaller towns had fewer opportunities for articles, concentrating practical training experiences in urban centers and among practitioners with better resources.
Law was an attractive profession for ambitious young Kenyans, and competition for admission to law school was intense. Like medicine, law school admission required excellent secondary school performance, limiting access to students from well-resourced schools. However, unlike medicine, which had historically been a male-dominated profession in Kenya even more than law, women's enrollment in law schools gradually expanded, though slowly. By the 1990s, women represented a notable minority of law students and increasingly of practicing lawyers, though senior positions in government and private practice remained male-dominated.
The legal profession's close relationship to government and politics influenced law education and the careers of graduates. Some law graduates entered government legal service, others private practice, some became judges or magistrates through government appointment. The profession offered pathways to political influence and power, making law school attractive to students with political ambitions or family connections to political elites. This concentration of political access among lawyers contributed to law's elite status and to the perpetuation of class and regional inequalities in access to legal education.
Legal education remained concentrated at the University of Nairobi throughout most of the post-independence period, meaning that law students had to relocate to Nairobi to study. The lack of other law schools until much later meant that Kenya's entire legal class was trained in one institution, creating networks of lawyers who had studied together and facilitating elite legal profession development. However, it also meant that geographic disparities in lawyers' distribution remained significant, with rural areas underserved compared to urban centers.
See Also
University of Nairobi Founding University Expansion Post-Colonial Education Social Mobility Education Nation Building Girls Education Access
Sources
- Court, D. and Kinyanjui, K. (1976). African Education: A Social and Institutional Analysis. Oxford University Press, pp. 289-312
- Sifuna, D.N. and Otiende, J.E. (1992). An Introductory History of Education in Kenya. University of Nairobi Press, pp. 178-201
- Bogonko, S.N. (1992). A History of Modern Education in Kenya. Evans Brothers, pp. 245-267