By Hon. Sarjo Barrow, Esq.
For over a decade, the University of The Gambia School of Law has produced graduates who go on to sit for the bar, enter chambers, and serve honorably in courts across the country. That is no small achievement. And now there is something more to celebrate. The School of Law has established a law journal, which has already reached Volume 6 and is now preparing Volume 7. That milestone deserves recognition. It also deserves support, because a journal that has come this far must not be allowed to stall. The question before the institution, the bar, and the student body is no longer whether to start. It is whether there is a commitment to sustain and grow what has been built.
Recognizing the Dean’s Leadership
Before any discussion of what comes next, a word is owed to those who got the journal here. Professor Opadere, Dean of the Faculty of Law, deserves particular recognition for the sustained effort it has taken to bring the journal from its first issue to Volume 6, with Volume 7 now in preparation. In any institution, and especially at a public university operating under real resource constraints, producing a legal journal consistently across multiple volumes is not routine administrative work. It is a deliberate act of academic leadership, repeated year after year.
What Dean Opadere has demonstrated is that the will to build a culture of legal scholarship at UTG is not merely aspirational. It is real and producing results. That example sets a standard, and it deserves to be acknowledged plainly, by the bar, by the bench, by students, and by the broader legal community. Volume 7 will not arrive by accident. It will arrive because someone in that dean’s office decided, again, that it matters.
What a Law Journal Actually Does
In the United States and most established legal systems, law reviews are considered a defining feature of legal education. Students who work on journals select and edit articles and publish their own work. The editor of a law review may influence articles later cited by the highest courts in the land.
The process trains students in ways the classroom alone cannot replicate. Cite-checking forces a writer to verify every factual claim. Editing requires a student to understand an argument well enough to improve it without distorting it. Writing a publishable note requires identifying a genuine gap in the law, marshaling authority, and constructing an original legal argument, which are the very skills that define practicing law.
Those skills must also be expressed in clear prose. Chief Justice John Roberts has remarked that he has yet to put down a brief and wished it had been longer, warning that poor writing forces judges to “hack through a jungle.” Justice Scalia, writing with Bryan Garner in “Making Your Case,” was equally direct: the writer must supply connective tissue between ideas, because back-to-back assertions without it are, in his words, verboten. The habits a law journal demands, clarity, precision, and logical flow, are precisely what keep lawyers out of Roberts’s jungle.
Speaking from personal experience, serving as an associate editor on a law journal was one of the most formative parts of my legal training. It did not replace the classroom; it completed it. Legal research and writing courses give students foundational tools, but journal work is where those tools get sharpened against real scholarly problems. You learn to read critically and to question claims that seem obvious. Our study group had a running joke for unsupported assertions: “According to the holy gospel of you.” That combination of coursework and journal work produces a different kind of legal thinker.
A 2023 U.S. News overview of American legal journals noted that journal membership offers “networking, intellectual stimulation, and help securing a job after law school.” More fundamentally, the experience shapes how a student thinks about law, not as a fixed body of rules to be memorized, but as a living, contested, and improvable discipline.
Volume 7 and the Momentum That Must Be Kept
Reaching Volume 6 of a law journal at a public university in The Gambia is not a minor feat. It reflects years of sustained effort by faculty, students, and administrators who believed the project was worth seeing through. Volume 7 represents more than the next issue. It is an opportunity to consolidate the journal’s reputation, broaden its reach, and deepen its quality. A cursory review of Volume 6 reveals a concerning trend. The absence of notable senior practitioners or giants in the legal industry writing on significant issues or hot topics in our jurisprudence.
This is important because each volume builds on the last. The citations accumulate. The institutional memory grows. Practitioners and scholars begin to take notice. But that trajectory is only possible if the support structures around the journal are strong enough to sustain it. This is the moment to ask honestly: Does the journal have what it needs? Dedicated faculty oversight, a clear editorial process, and a pipeline of student writers who are encouraged, not merely permitted, to contribute?
Why Student Involvement Is the Heart of It
A law journal succeeds or fails on the strength of its student involvement. Students who serve as editors, cite-checkers, and note writers are not simply producing content. They are developing the analytical habits that will define their careers at the bar. The student who spends a semester tracking down the source behind a footnote, questioning whether a cited case actually supports the proposition it is said to stand for, and then defending that judgment to a faculty adviser, is doing something no examination can replicate. That student is practicing law. The experience builds a kind of intellectual confidence that is hard to acquire any other way.
For UTG students in particular, the journal represents a rare opportunity to contribute to the written record of Gambian law at a formative stage of their careers. Many of the legal questions this country faces, in constitutional development, commercial regulation, land rights, and human rights, are still being worked out. A student who engages seriously with those questions through the journal is not just completing a writing assignment. That student is participating in the development of Gambian jurisprudence.
The School of Law should make journal participation a visible and valued part of student life. Students should be actively recruited to submit notes and comments. Faculty should create writing seminars that feed directly into journal submissions. When employers and bar examiners see journal experience on a graduate’s record, they should know exactly what it means.
Why the Gambia Bar Association Must Be an Active Partner
The journal cannot grow in isolation. The Gambia Bar Association has a direct stake in the quality of legal reasoning that new graduates bring to the bar, and contributing to the journal is one of the most direct ways to invest in that quality. Experienced practitioners bring something no student can supply on their own: years of courtroom experience, knowledge of how legal arguments land before judges, and familiarity with the gaps between the law on paper and the law in practice. Indeed, Chief Justice Hassan Jallow, Dr. Satang Nabaneh, Hon. Ousman Jammeh (later Hon. Fafa Mbai), and Lawyer Lamin J. Darbo all make meaningful contributions to legal jurisprudence through scholarly writing. Many should emulate them and use the UTG journal, as Kerr Fatou and the others are filling the void.
Senior lawyers who have appeared before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have a particular responsibility here. The decisions they have argued, the procedural questions they have navigated, the statutory interpretations they have won or lost on, all of that experience belongs in a serious legal publication. It should not remain locked in memory or buried in old briefs.
A meaningful model already exists. Wisconsin Lawyer, published by the State Bar of Wisconsin, covers recent appellate and Supreme Court decisions, analyzes emerging issues across practice areas, and carries op-eds on live legal questions. As a member of the Wisconsin Bar and a then-solo practitioner fresh out of law school, I found it a genuine professional asset. The Gambia Bar Association could build something complementary to the UTG journal: a monthly or quarterly publication reporting on decisions of the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, addressing comparative and regional developments, and providing a common forum for practitioners. Together, the journal and a bar publication would create an ecosystem of legal writing that currently does not exist.
The Need for Sustained Institutional Support
None of this happens without institutional commitment. Sustaining the journal through Volume 7 and beyond requires resources, faculty time, administrative support, and a clear signal from leadership that the journal is a priority. A journal needs a faculty adviser with protected time to guide student writers. It needs a budget, however modest, for printing and distribution. And it needs a submission process that is open, clear, and publicly communicated to students and practitioners alike.
This matters beyond the classroom. The General Legal Council has expressed concern that some newly called attorneys may not be fully prepared to practice. Where preparation falls short, the reasons are often structural. A student body with a strong journal culture produces better-prepared graduates. The journal is not a luxury. It is part of the solution.
Closing the Gap in Gambian Legal Records
Since 1980, The Gambia has had a Law Report. Yet published opinions have overwhelmingly failed to cite binding Gambian precedent, as though it were nonexistent or every question a novelty. Something the author attributes to the lack of an online database of Gambian caselaw, whether maintained by the courts or otherwise. A bar periodical that regularly digests and publishes opinions would begin to close that gap. The National Assembly should also consider legislation requiring that all laws and judicial opinions be published on a public website to ensure compliance with the notice requirement. Dr. Nabaneh’s Law Hub should not shoulder this alone.
A law journal that is actively supported, widely read, and regularly cited begins to change the culture of legal reasoning in a country. Lawyers who know their arguments will be read and scrutinized write better arguments. Judges who know their opinions will be analyzed in print write more carefully reasoned opinions. Students who know their notes will be published, will write with greater care and ambition. That virtuous cycle is available to The Gambia. Six volumes have already set it in motion.
A Call to Action
The University of The Gambia School of Law has built something real, and Volume 7 is an opportunity to go further. The call now is to everyone with a stake in the quality of Gambian legal life: to the School of Law, to sustain and invest in the journal as a central feature of legal education; to the Gambia Bar Association, to treat the journal as a partner institution and contribute actively to its pages; and to students, to see journal participation not as an optional extra but as an essential part of becoming a lawyer.
The foundation is no longer missing. It is being built, volume by volume, through the dedication of those who refused to let the project fade. The question is whether the bar, the bench, and the student body will now step forward to meet that effort. The gap between what exists and what is possible is entirely closable, and the work is already underway.
The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the United States Department of Justice or the United States.
