In a thought-provoking reflection titled “A World of a Lawyer’s Making,” Osagyefo Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Constitutional, Rights & Policy Strategy Advisor at the Democracy Accountability Hub, has delivered a sharp critique of how lawyers’ idiosyncrasies have shaped modern governance and societal norms.
His essay delved into the pervasive influence of the legal profession on political processes, constitutions, and governance structures, arguing that this dominance has created systemic biases and conceptual blind spots.
“I believe we live in a world shaped by lawyers. As such, our world inherits much of their idiosyncrasies: a penchant for legal technicalities, and often, a narrow-minded approach to problem-solving. In this ‘lawyers’ world,’ it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between Justice (a deeply moral concept) and Legality (the rules)”.
Osagyefo Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Constitutional, Rights & Policy Strategy Advisor at the Democracy Accountability Hub
According to him, Lawyers often confuse law with justice, assuming the two are synonymous, asserting that this conflation misleads society into accepting legal constructs as moral absolutes.
Barker-Vormawor highlighted how governance itself has become ‘law-ified,’ with constitutions and political processes heavily influenced by legal interpretations.
He observed that society has come to rely on lawyers to rationalise and interpret the very systems they constructed. This, he argued, limits the capacity for broader, non-legal approaches to problem-solving in governance.
“Our talk shows, political processes, constitutions, and governance have all become deeply ‘law-ified.’ As a result, we, as a society, struggle to interpret or make sense of the world without the lens of the lawyers who shaped it”.
Osagyefo Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Constitutional, Rights & Policy Strategy Advisor at the Democracy Accountability HubLe
Legal Rituals and Professional Biases in Constitutions
A particularly striking example is Barker-Vormawor’s concerns with determining service conditions for public offices. He pointed to the tendency of legal drafters to compare the qualifications or conditions of service for certain roles to those of judges, a practice he finds both arbitrary and emblematic of lawyers’ professional habits.
Using Article 44 of Ghana’s Constitution as a case in point, he highlighted provisions that equate the terms and conditions of the Electoral Commission Chairperson to those of a Justice of the Court of Appeal and the Deputy Chairpersons to Justices of the High Court.
He noted the absurdity of using judges’ salaries or status as benchmarks for unrelated roles, describing it as a ‘quick bias’ rooted in familiarity.
“ Nowhere else in the world is the salary or status of a judge used as a unit of measurement for determining the conditions of service for totally unrelated positions. But when lawyers don’t know what to do, they defer to the rituals of their profession and the familiar.”
Osagyefo Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor, Constitutional, Rights & Policy Strategy Advisor at the Democracy Accountability Hub
Mandating Legal Qualifications: A Misstep?
Barker-Vormawor argued that this reliance on legal norms has led to a systemic bias that implicitly—or explicitly—mandates that certain roles be filled by lawyers, even when it is unnecessary.
He pointed to the Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners for the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) as an example, questioning why legal qualifications should be a prerequisite for these positions.
“The consequence of this approach? It creates the quick bias that all these various roles must be occupied by lawyers,” he wrote, adding that many lawyers fail to see any problem with this phenomenon.
In his tentative conclusion, Barker-Vormawor called for a critical examination of the dominance of legal norms in governance and societal structures.
He acknowledged that his thoughts are still “fluid and needing refinement” but hinted at the need for broader, multidisciplinary approaches to governance—ones that move beyond the legal profession’s inherent biases.
Barker-Vormawor’s remarks resonate deeply in the context of Ghana’s constitutional framework and governance.
His critique raises questions about the over-reliance on legal frameworks to solve moral and practical problems, challenging policymakers, academics, and the public to consider alternative perspectives.
READ ALSO: Ghana Urged to Balance Hydrocarbons, Renewable Investments
