|
|
and Australia, where some universities have now started to follow the U.S. model, abandoning the traditional undergraduate law degree program, the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree, in favor of a postbachelor's degree, the U.S.-style Juris Doctor (JD) degree.
An underlying thesis of chapter 4 is that although the United Kingdom and the United States have fairly old and well-established universities, a number of LLB programs at Commonwealth African law schools are as good as similar programs at leading British and American law schools—that is, the LLB degree in the United Kingdom and the JD degree in the United States. The author argues that, the Master of Laws (LLM) and Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) programs in the United States, unlike their U.K. counterparts, the LLM and the PhD in law, do not have much to offer to Commonwealth African law schools. If anything, a number of American law schools are constructing unaccredited post-JD degree programs, such as the LLM and SJD degrees, which Americans themselves often shun and do not even attach much value to, as a way of making easy money from desperate foreign-trained lawyers who either want to break in to the U.S. job market or have limited knowledge and information about the U.S. system of legal education and law practice. That said, the trend in the United Kingdom of permitting some LLB graduates to proceed directly to PhD programs is of limited attractiveness for students in Africa.
Chapter 5 examines the prospects for introducing and applying total quality management (TQM) as a means of improving the institutional and management performance of the University of Zambia Teaching Hospital (UTH). This hospital, as the author observes, is the primary clinical institution for training medical doctors in Zambia. And the country has only one medical school, the University of Zambia's Ridgeway Campus, which relies heavily on the institutional facilities at UTH. To that extent, the delivery of medical education at Ridgeway Campus is likely to be affected, in part, by standards pertaining to the institutional and management performance of UTH. The author argues that medical practitioners are expected to learn more readily, especially with regard to clinical training, in a hospital environment where they can gain exposure