Sixteen more UG law students secure LCE at Hugh Wooding Stabroek News July 20, 1998 Graduates of the University of Guyana (UG) law programme, continue to do well at the Hugh Wooding Law School despite the unwillingness of the Council of Legal Education (CLE) to grant automatic entry to graduates of the programme to the Hugh Wooding Law School. This year, sixteen of twenty graduates who gained admission and entered the Hugh Wooding Law School in 1996, have obtained the Legal Certificate of Education (LCE) entitling them to practice before the Courts in the region. They are Lyndon Amsterdam, Wayde Bardswell, Simone Bullen, Rosemarie Choo-Shee-Nam, Fidela Corbin, Paula Gilford, Beverly Griffith, Ishelli Joseph, Marcia Nadir, Mohabir Nandlall, Joy Persaud, Nicola Pierre, Bibi Shadick, Dhanwanti Sukdeo, Oneidge Walrond, and Hissaun Yassin. Two of the 1995 UG law graduates who entered Hugh Wooding in 1996 were also successful. They are Emily Dodson and Kumar Doraisami. Stabroek News understands unofficially, that Mohabir Nandlall is to be awarded the Robert Matthieu Sellier Prize for being the best student in trial advocacy. It is the second successive year that a UG law graduate has won the prize. Last year's winner was Toussaint Boyce. Meanwhile, five of the seven UG law graduates who successfully wrote the entrance examination and entered the law school last year, passed their first year examination. They are Lester Caesar, Robert Corbin, Desiree Downes, Prabha Persaud and Reakha Persaud. Lestrade Charles, a Dominican, who graduated from the UG law programme, was also successful at the first year examination. The five are now on 12-week attachments with law firms in Guyana. Meanwhile, efforts to have UG law graduates be given automatic entry to the LCE programme continue to be frustrated. Foreign Minister, Clement Rohee told Stabroek News on Wednesday, that the final report of the legal experts committee appointed following a decision by the CARICOM Heads in 1997, was not ready for discussion at this year's Summit in St Lucia. He said that the Guyana delegation had tried to have the Committee's interim report tabled, but there was no consensus for doing this. The committee was set up to look into the matter of the granting of automatic entry of UG law graduates to the Hugh Wooding Law School. Since it begun to offer Year 2 and 3 of the LL.B programme, graduates from UG from 1995, have had to undergo the trauma of uncertainty as government and university officials battled with the CLE to get them admitted to Hugh Wooding. The CLE is chaired by Guyanese, Ashton Chase SC. The '96 UG law graduates only gained admission after the Guyana government undertook to underwrite the holding of a special meeting of the CLE in St Kitts, to review the decision of the Dean of the Law Faculty of the University of the West Indies that the UG degree was not equivalent to its law degree. At that meeting, it was agreed that the top 20 students of the graduating class of thirty-one would be admitted. A number of the graduates who were excluded as a result of the decision unsuccessfully sued the law school and the CLE in the Trinidad and Tobago High Court.