LDC set to open new campus in Mbale City

The Law Development Centre (LDC) is set to open another campus in Mbale City as it continues to liberalise its Bar Course country-wide to train professional lawyers.

The opening of the Mbale campus set for June 1, will bring to three the number of upcountry campuses, after Mbarara and Lira.
This was revealed during an exploratory visit that the LDC top management held in Mbale District last week.
 
The Chairperson Management Committee, Justice Paul Mugamba, led the delegation to Mbale to meet different stakeholders including the resident city commissioner, district chairperson, Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs.
“We intend to open a campus for the Eastern region of the country. We have one in Kampala, as you may be aware. In 2018, we opened another in Mbarara, and Lira in 2021,” retired Justice Mugamba said last Tuesday at Mbale High Court.

He explained that it is part of government policy to take services closer to the people. He asked for the cooperation of the local people and the civic leaders.

The Director of LDC, Mr Frank Nigel Othembi, recalled the establishment of the Mbale campus as an impossible dream a few years ago. 
He thanked the management committee, the Attorney General, the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, and other stakeholders who offered the institution great support towards the realisation of what he called a “tremendous achievement”.

In the recently released Bar Course results, Mbarara and Lira emerged as the best-performing campuses, ahead of Kampala, an achievement Mr Othembi attributed to the focus exhibited by students at the institution branches upcountry.
The LDC, which was established in 1969, is the only institution that teaches the Bar Course to lawyers.
In Uganda, a lawyer cannot represent a litigant in court without a post-graduate diploma from the LDC.

Until 2021, the Kampala main campus was the only centre that would teach the Bar Course and there was fear that opening up other campuses across the country would dilute the quality of lawyers produced.
However, in 2021, the institution decided to decentralise with the management promising to put in place a quality control mechanism to ensure that students are exposed to the same training across the various campuses.
Random criteria are what the institution uses to distribute students to the various campuses.