Thousands of freshly minted lawyers will be queuing at the Supreme Court today to join the bar, after successfully finishing a year at the Kenya School of Law (KSL) and another year of pupillage.
But did they really have to spend a year at the Kenya School of law to become lawyers, even after studying law for four years at university?
Some pundits argue they did not have to, and that Kenya’s legal education curriculum needs to edit out the Kenya School of law.
One fierce critic of the KSL is Senior Counsel Duncan Mindo—one of the oldest members of Kenya’s bar—who insists that Kenya’s legal history owes these students an apology for delaying their entry to the bar by an entire year.
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The white-haired alumnus of Alliance High School and the University of Dar es Salaam, whose pupils include former Chief Justice David Maraga, was among the fiery law students at Dar in the 1960s who publicly dismissed the newly established KSL as “a school for failures”—a comment that sparked a noisy press brawl with allies of the then Attorney General Charles Njonjo.
According to its website, the KSL was established in 1963 with a pioneer class of 11 students, on a four-acre plot on Valley Road, where the University of Nairobi’s Dental School now stands. Initially, it was a department within the Attorney General’s Office until July 2001 when it became a semi-autonomous government agency.
But according to Mr Mindo, the school was born of neo-colonial vanity rather than educational vision. The idea of post-colonial legal training for black Africans was first discussed in the 1961 Denning Report, formally titled The Report of the Committee on Legal Education for Students from Africa.
The report envisioned territorial law schools under local universities that would nurture a professional African legal corps. At independence, East Africa’s premier colleges—Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere—were still satellite campuses of the University of London.
The British proposed that these colleges begin offering law degrees locally, effectively transferring legal education to African hands. Uganda and Tanzania seized the chance, setting up independent law faculties.
Kenya, however, rejected the offer, and Mindo claims Njonjo was to blame. According to Mindo, the then AG argued that Kenya was “not ready” to train African lawyers and should continue sending its students to the University of London.
That thinking, Mindo insists, reflected a colonial hangover: The fear that training African lawyers would create political agitators.
And so it came to pass, that instead of training a new breed of African lawyers, Kenya chose to train court clerks first. Then the Kenya School of Law emerged, not as a true law school but as a clerical training centre meant to train court clerks on how to prepare court documents and keep court files.
Even when Dar es Salaam and Makerere opened their doors to top A-level students eager to study law, Nairobi continued exporting its future lawyers to London. Those who could not make it to A-level or university—but wanted a foot in the legal system—enrolled at KSL.
Later, when the University College of Nairobi became a fully-fledged institution and launched its own law degree programme and KSL’s relevance was again put into question. But again, says Mindo, Njonjo intervened—this time to preserve the jobs of his British associates running the school. Instead of abolishing it, he advised the government to convert it into a post-graduate institution offering a diploma in law.
Then the question arose among legal pundits – Why should someone who already has a law degree go back to another school to be taught how to be a lawyer?
In Tanzania and Uganda, graduates from Dar and Makerere proceeded straight from university into legal practice after pupillage—no extra diploma required. Mindo himself did so, joining the Attorney General’s office as assistant registrar straight from Dar es Salaam’s law school, helping transition African courts into magistrates’ courts.
Over the decades, KSL has undergone multiple reforms. Yet, the debate over its relevance refuses to die. On September 25, 2025, Asande Felix Makori, a law lecturer at Embu University, reignited the controversy in The Standard, arguing that to compel every law graduate to pass through KSL is outdated and unjust.
Dr Makori questioned how a single school can accommodate the flood of graduates from Kenya’s now numerous law faculties.
His argument echoes Mindo’s: That the Kenya School of Law may have been a legal education misstep from its inception—an institution created out of political ego rather than academic need.
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Thousands of freshly minted lawyers will be queuing at the Supreme Court today to join the bar, after successfully finishing a year at the Kenya School of Law (KSL) and another year of pupillage.
But did they really have to spend a year at the Kenya School of law to become lawyers, even after studying law for four years at university?
Some pundits argue they did not have to, and that Kenya’s legal education curriculum needs to edit out the Kenya School of law.
One fierce critic of the KSL is Senior Counsel Duncan Mindo—one of the oldest members of Kenya’s bar—who insists that Kenya’s legal history owes these students an apology for delaying their entry to the bar by an entire year.
Follow The Standard
channel
on WhatsApp
The white-haired alumnus of Alliance High School and the University of Dar es Salaam, whose pupils include former Chief Justice David Maraga, was among the fiery law students at Dar in the 1960s who publicly dismissed the newly established KSL as “a school for failures”—a comment that sparked a noisy press brawl with allies of the then Attorney General Charles Njonjo.
According to its website, the KSL was established in 1963 with a pioneer class of 11 students, on a four-acre plot on Valley Road, where the University of Nairobi’s Dental School now stands. Initially, it was a department within the Attorney General’s Office until July 2001 when it became a semi-autonomous government agency.
But according to Mr Mindo, the school was born of neo-colonial vanity rather than educational vision. The idea of post-colonial legal training for black Africans was first discussed in the 1961 Denning Report, formally titled The Report of the Committee on Legal Education for Students from Africa.
The report envisioned territorial law schools under local universities that would nurture a professional African legal corps. At independence, East Africa’s premier colleges—Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere—were still satellite campuses of the University of London.
The British proposed that these colleges begin offering law degrees locally, effectively transferring legal education to African hands. Uganda and Tanzania seized the chance, setting up independent law faculties.
Kenya, however, rejected the offer, and Mindo claims Njonjo was to blame. According to Mindo, the then AG argued that Kenya was “not ready” to train African lawyers and should continue sending its students to the University of London.
That thinking, Mindo insists, reflected a colonial hangover: The fear that training African lawyers would create political agitators.
And so it came to pass, that instead of training a new breed of African lawyers, Kenya chose to train court clerks first. Then the Kenya School of Law emerged, not as a true law school but as a clerical training centre meant to train court clerks on how to prepare court documents and keep court files.
Even when Dar es Salaam and Makerere opened their doors to top A-level students eager to study law, Nairobi continued exporting its future lawyers to London. Those who could not make it to A-level or university—but wanted a foot in the legal system—enrolled at KSL.
Later, when the University College of Nairobi became a fully-fledged institution and launched its own law degree programme and KSL’s relevance was again put into question. But again, says Mindo, Njonjo intervened—this time to preserve the jobs of his British associates running the school. Instead of abolishing it, he advised the government to convert it into a post-graduate institution offering a diploma in law.
Then the question arose among legal pundits – Why should someone who already has a law degree go back to another school to be taught how to be a lawyer?
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In Tanzania and Uganda, graduates from Dar and Makerere proceeded straight from university into legal practice after pupillage—no extra diploma required. Mindo himself did so, joining the Attorney General’s office as assistant registrar straight from Dar es Salaam’s law school, helping transition African courts into magistrates’ courts.
Over the decades, KSL has undergone multiple reforms. Yet, the debate over its relevance refuses to die. On September 25, 2025, Asande Felix Makori, a law lecturer at Embu University, reignited the controversy in
The Standard
, arguing that to compel every law graduate to pass through KSL is outdated and unjust.
Dr Makori questioned how a single school can accommodate the flood of graduates from Kenya’s now numerous law faculties.
His argument echoes Mindo’s: That the Kenya School of Law may have been a legal education misstep from its inception—an institution created out of political ego rather than academic need.
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channel
on WhatsApp
By Karanja Muchiri