The Uganda Law Council has announced the reintroduction of pre-entry examinations for students seeking admission to the Law Development Centre (LDC). This policy will take effect for two academic years, starting 2025/2026 and 2026/2027, as part of a transitional phase ahead of the much-anticipated National Bar Course, which will be implemented in the 2027/2028 academic year.
The announcement, which has been circulating widely across legal education forums and student groups, signals the Council’s renewed commitment to quality control in the training of future legal practitioners.
Under the new directive, all law graduates who intend to join the LDC for the Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice will once again be required to sit and pass a pre-entry examination—an assessment that had previously been phased out, leading to growing concerns about declining standards and high failure rates at the Bar Course.
While no official statement has yet been released by the Law Council, sources familiar with the development say the move is aimed at ensuring only qualified and well-prepared candidates progress to legal practice training.
The reintroduction of the exams comes at a time when Uganda’s legal education is undergoing major reforms. The most notable among them is the upcoming National Bar Course, a new harmonized legal training program that is expected to replace the current LDC-exclusive Bar Course starting in the 2027/2028 academic year. The National Bar Course will be a standardized program that is likely to be offered across multiple institutions under the supervision of the Law Council.
Stakeholders in the legal education sector have long called for stricter regulation of entry into the profession, citing concerns about the inconsistent quality of legal graduates from various institutions across the country.
Dr. Pamela Tibihikirra-Kalyegira, the Director of the LDC, has previously advocated for entrance exams to be administered even earlier—at undergraduate level—as a way of ensuring that only the most capable students are admitted to law school in the first place. “Pre-entry at LDC comes too late. By then, students have invested significant time and resources into their law degrees,” she said in an earlier interview.
The return of the LDC pre-entry exam, even if temporarily for two academic years, is being interpreted by many observers as a necessary stop-gap measure while the sector prepares for the full rollout of the National Bar Course.
