Procedural Exclusivity in Ghana: The Legacy of O'Reilly v. Mackman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically re-evaluates the procedural exclusivity rule from O’Reilly v. Mackman in the context of Ghana’s post-colonial constitutional development, and examines its implications for access to justice and public accountability. It interrogates the issue of whether Ghanaian courts should rigidly require judicial review for all public law claims or adopt a more flexible approach suited to Ghana’s constitutional framework. Using a doctrinal-comparative method and drawing on Critical Legal Studies (CLS), the study analyzes English case law, Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, and the High Court Civil Procedure Rules (C.I. 47). It shows that Ghanaian courts have applied the exclusivity rule inconsistently—sometimes strictly, other times flexibly—raising concerns about access to justice and procedural fairness. The CLS lens reveals that rigid procedural rules can reinforce power structures and hinder public accountability. The article proposes reforms, including a four-category procedural framework, clearer judicial guidance, and a narrow “manifest injustice” exception to the procedural exclusivity rule to avoid unjust outcomes. The findings suggest that procedural exclusivity, if applied without sensitivity to Ghana’s legal context, risks undermining substantive justice. The article concludes that Ghanaian courts should balance adherence to rigid procedural requirements with access to justice, ensuring that public law claims can be heard without being derailed by overly rigid procedural rules.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".