LOOKING BACK WITH A VIEW OF MOVING FORWARD Expansion and Progress By Clay Hackett
LOOKING BACK WITH A VIEW OF MOVING FORWARD Expansion and Progress By Clay Hackett
The old building( right) with the recent addition to the St. Augustine Faculty of Law( left)
With the expansion of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies( U. W. I), St. Augustine, we should be very mindful of the legacy which we leave to future generations of law students. The University of the West Indies has been producing some of the region’ s, and one might argue, the world’ s finest judicial officers and legal practitioners. One merely has to look at the holders of the country’ s highest judicial and executive positions, U. W. I alumni such as Chief Justice Ivor Archie and Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to give validity to that statement. For the first time ever, undergraduates undertaking the LLB programme will have the opportunity to do so fully in Trinidad & Tobago. This article aims to give a background to an institution which has been providing regional legal education for over forty years and its incremental progression to ultimately providing a full-fledged faculty in T & T.
The Faculty of Law opened its doors in September 1970 at the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados to offer legal education at the University level. The St. Augustine and Mona campuses were Departments of the Faculty. Only the first year of the three year programme was taught here and students had to continue at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados. In these initial stages, there were thirty-four students at Mona Campus, Jamaica; nineteen at St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago; thirty-five at Cave Hill, Barbados and thirteen at the Turkeyen Campus of the University of Guyana.
The Faculty at St. Augustine has been staffed by legal luminaries; some of whom will be familiar to all of us. Mrs. Tanya Parker was seconded from the University of Nottingham during 1970
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