– Photo courtesy of Wayne Law
Chief Justice Georgina Wood of the Republic of Ghana recently visited Wayne State University Law School to learn more about its master of laws programs and confer with three Ghanaian judges studying there.
The three judges – Ruby Aryeetey and Gabriel Mate-Teye, both of the nation’s Circuit Court, and Mercy Kotei of the Cape Coast Magistrate’s Court (comparable to an American district court) – have been at Wayne Law since August as students in the law school’s master of laws program. They’ll return home this month.
Wood visited Wayne Law on Friday, April 24, to speak with faculty members, attend a presentation at the Law Library, meet with Dean Jocelyn Benson and Provost Margaret Winters, and to catch a glimpse of the African collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, said Associate Professor Paul Dubinsky, Wayne Law’s director of graduate studies.
“Justice Wood and I talked at some length about her thoughts about judicial education and the ability of the Ghanaian judiciary to serve its people in the most effective way with the maximum intellectual capacity and how the graduate programs at Wayne Law can contribute to that vision,” Dubinsky said.
Wayne Law in fall 2014 began offering a master of laws degree in U.S. law for foreign law students and lawyers. The goal of the program is to prepare international students for careers in which a solid grounding in the U.S. legal system is desirable, whether that career is in government, business, academia, the judiciary or private practice. The Wayne Law program is in response to a growing market of foreign lawyers and judges seeking advanced degrees in U.S. law.
Ghana, like the United States, has a common law system, written Constitution, independent judiciary and Supreme Court. Most judges in Ghana, however, enter judicial careers right after university studies. In the U.S., judicial careers tend to be launched much later in a lawyer’s career.
Wood is the first woman in Ghana’s history to head that nation’s judiciary. She served as a Supreme Court justice from 2003 until 2007, when the Parliament of Ghana approved her nomination to chief justice.
“Ghana is in a state of flux, legal-wise,” Kotei said. “What we are trying to do is gather the best practices from across the globe. We wanted to study how the U.S. legal system works to see what aspects of it we can incorporate into our system.” One major difference between the Ghanaian and American legal systems is the number of justices allowed on the two nations’ supreme courts, Mate-Teye said.
“Here, there are nine Supreme Court judges always,” he said. “In Ghana, we are not limited in the number of Supreme Court justices.”
Aryeetey said that she has been particularly interested in reading American judicial judgments, and she expects the knowledge she’s gained to impact her own decision writing once she returns to the bench.
“I’ve read so many cases and there are so many ways judges write their decisions,” she said.
All three Ghanaian judges in Wayne Law’s master of laws program have found the classes here more student-oriented than they expected.
“Here, the professors try to develop a relationship with the students, Kotei said. “They want to know the students’ concerns. Back home, it is more impersonal.”
Said Mate-Teye: “There is more lecturing there, and at the end of the day, the professors might ask one or two questions.”
Aryeetey said they especially enjoyed meeting the other international students in the master of laws program.
“We were able to bond,” she said. “It was a nice class we had.”
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