NBA Owerri Branch Law Week 2025: Keynote Speech by Prof. Chidi Odinkalu

RESHAPING LEGAL PRACTICE AND JUSTICE DELIVERY: CHARTING THE FUTURE OF THE (LEGAL) PROFESSION IN NIGERIA

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu¹

The views and opinions expressed here belong exclusively to the author and do not necessarily or at all reflect the policies or positions of any institutions with whom he is currently or has previously been associated.

IN LIEU OF AN INTRODUCTION

I should begin with an apology, an allocutus, a word of gratitude, and an important clarification.

First, the apology. As the descendant of a lineage of teachers on both sides of my family, I learnt very early the importance of punctuality and of consequences of not keeping to time. I am on my way back from Commencement season obligations in the North American academic season and I have had to race back in a bit of a haste on a reorganized itinerary in order to share in this happy occasion. I have missed part of the opening as a result and may, indeed, miss some of the activities hereafter to. For that I apologise.

Herein also lies the imperative for my allocutus. With a body clock caught in between continents, it is well possible that some of what I may say could be stuck in transit or caught in a contest between spirits and ancestors in different parts of the Atlantic. To the extent that this could be foreseeable, I would please like to apply respectfully that the blame should go to the spirits.

This does not preclude me from recognizing that this is a difficult season in which to survive or to gather in the name of law and justice in Nigeria. All over the country, including, of course, within the legal profession, hardship abounds. In a country overcome by evident signs of a reign of the twin ogres of impunity and vigilantism, it is predictably difficult to speak about law and even less so, invoke the idea of justice.

The banishment of justice from the consciousness of law and legality in Nigeria is the result of an interaction of factors both exogenous and endogenous to the legal profession and its institutions. A political economy of impunity has been enabled, even weaponized by a preoccupation with a jurisprudence of performative technicality. The result is a country in which the rich who have amassed appearances of power and material comfort at the expense of the poor. General Sam Momah, pioneer Commandant of Nigeria’s Defence College describes the country as one in which “the poor cannot sleep because of hunger, and the rich cannot sleep because the poor is awake.”²

This is why gratitude is important to the organisers of this gathering. For the opportunity to be able to join in this event today, therefore, I should thank the Nigerian Bar Association, Owerri Branch, and also for curating a Law Week with a combination of activities and experiences for mind, body, and spirit in the right doses and with appropriate attention to the public good. Present hardships around the country could easily dissuade or even forbid people from harbouring thoughts about the future. Yet, through the programme that they have designed, the leadership and membership of the Branch convey and telegraph a message of optimism notwithstanding a context that could look dystopian. The vocation of leadership, it has to be said, comprises essentially in sowing and sustaining hope, especially in tough times and for its effort to contribute to this, the Branch deserves commendation.

Having said all this, I would apply most respectfully as I begin to make an important clarification as to my standing and claim to this podium. I consider it a privilege, no doubt, to participate in this ritual of learning among peers, colleagues, friends and elders. I do not take this privilege lightly and, because of that, it is important that I declare my interests. I do not come here as a person with qualifications in legal studies or, even less so, as someone who has taught law across three continents. For reasons that will become evident shortly, I come here as someone who aspires to claim this land as theirs on the basis of citizenship and not as a temporary privilege or benefit.

Ernest Rennan reminds us in his classic on the meaning of nationhood published shortly a mere two years before the onset of the Berlin West Africa Conference, that a nation is “the expression of a great solidarity, constituted by a feeling for the common sacrifices that have been made and for those one is prepared to make again….”³ I recognize that citizenship embodies a promissory note exchanged between sovereign and citizens; and between the dead, the living and the unborn. But it also signifies entitlements which can only be realized through a dialectical process anchored in both memory and narrative. Unlike the privilege of being a lawyer which imposes constraints on honesty, the entitlement of citizenship confers a duty of candour on those willing to claim or fight for it.

The subject matter of this week requires that we speak to ourselves candidly for, as a proverb from these parts says, when kinsfolk depart a family meeting in laughter and merriment, it can only be because they have not discharged their duties of candour to one another. This is, therefore, why Rennan insists that “Nations are not something eternal. They have begun, they will end….”⁴ Those on whose watch this occurs, however, will not be spared harsh judgement from posterity. This is why we must take the duty of civic candour and the companion duty of vigilance that comes with it seriously.

This convening takes place amidst a profound crisis afflicting the institutions of the legal process in Imo State. The occupancy of the office of the Chief Judge has been the subject of freestyle political wrestling. The immediate past substantive occupant of that office left in a scandal. The orchestration of succession in the aftermath of that has left much to be desired. While all that goes on, the Court of Appeal in Owerri has been shuttered by the leadership of the Court of Appeal despite the clear advice of the security services and with no clear indication of when this will be reconsidered.

For litigants as well as lawyers, all these impose high costs on dignity, access to and exit from the courts, as well as on practical issues of subsistence and earnings. Amidst all this, most lawyers feel obliged by self-imposed circumstances of peer-group solidarity or vocational coercion from speaking up. Our situation as a country, as a people and as a profession demands that we articulate ourselves clearly on these issues and it is my belief that we can do that while enjoying the fullness of the experience offered by this week’s programme and while honoring the memory and sacrifices of those who have come before us.

GOOD FRIENDS WE LOST: REMEMBERING WHAT THE LAW IS ABOUT

Despite all the present challenges or because of them, the theme of this Law Week is quite timely. This event occurs in a location and in a time when the administration of justice and the practice of law of law is in severe peril. Many parts of the south-east generally and of Imo State, in particular, have been in thrall to violent militias for long. The toll of death, destruction, disappearance, destitution, and displacement has yet to be fully evaluated. The official count, for what it is worth, reflects only a fraction of the actual mortality and destruction.

Even those conservative numbers are themselves frightening. I computed some of this in my capacity as the Chair of the Truth, Justice, and Peace Commission in Anambra State between 2022 to 2024.

It is fitting in starting, therefore, to please invite us – with leave of the Chairperson – to acknowledge all those whom we have lost in this violence with a moment of solemn silence.

In the midst of these developments, institutions of the administration of justice have suffered unquantifiable loss and destruction: the police, prisons, courts, lawyers have all been affected. The trauma has been profound. In many parts of the state and the region, courts no longer function; the security services have been exiled. Judges and courts have been displaced into the state capital. Lawyers have been banished, forced to relocate their practice at short or no notice for safety reasons. Many clients have been intimidated into withdrawing their cases from mechanisms of civil dispute resolution, surrendering them instead to militias who conduct their own dispute resolution through mechanisms of ordeal. The conclusion of cases in such forums is sometimes reportedly followed by torture or painful death, with many of the victims not accounted for and their families denied closure.

These events should remind us why the law is important. Many of us in this hall, successful lawyers with mansions and property in our villages to show for it, have been trapped in Owerri, unable to go home for years. This is what happens when the law and institutions for its administration are reduced to rituals of technicality with no bearing on the interests or aspirations of the people and communities whom it is meant to serve. As lawyers, we tell ourselves that we are learned. But being learned without being able to articulate or reflect an enlightened self-interest in our attitudes to law and lawyering is self-harm.

A different keynote speaker would probably use this podium to regale you with tales of Artificial Intelligence, Chat GPT, and Algorithmic Lawyering. That is escape and avoidance when you cannot get to your village because of insecurity and cannot sleep in your urban apartment or work in your study because you lack predictable energy. Even at that, technology is a downstream application that only aligns well when you have as asset infrastructure in processes, institutions and people first. I would seek permission, therefore, to begin by addressing briefly the political economy of our legal practice and justice delivery.

WHEN CAROLINE WENT TO COURT

This then is the context in which this Law Week invites us to chart a future for the legal profession. I argue that to be able to chart the future usefully, we must excavate memory of where we are coming from and also reflect fully on our present predicaments. Milan Kundera usefully reminds us that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”5 Memory is contested territory and political memory is even more viciously contested by the powerful.

This is the reason that the pedagogy of law in our parts law avoids narrative and prefers the path of doctrine, because narrative can be uncomfortable while doctrine is good for programming us into habits dictated by suggestibility.

This Law Week also invites us into a conversation on “legal practice and justice delivery”. The juxtaposition of these expressions could be designed to suggest, somewhat reflexively, that one thing (legal practice), necessarily yields the other (justice delivery). Indeed, this is one of those assumptions that the pedagogy of law in all former British colonies, including Nigeria, encourages law students to make long before the even get enrolled as professionals even when our daily experience as citizens yields only the opposite conclusions. So many instances occur daily across the country in which citizens who go the institutions seeking justice encounter actors interested only in transacting in the law, with no interest either the administering justice or in delivering it.

Operators of the system – as lawyers, magistrates, law enforcement personnel, bailiffs, judges among others – deliberately build dysfunctions into the process as revenue streams in an esoteric transaction, creating appearances of being involved in the serious business of administering justice while clearly not interested in delivering it. The most charitable anyone can be about much of what transpires in our system is to call it the administration of law. In reality, what we administer is not law but impunity.

On the scale from status to contract, our legal system is still stuck in the early stages of status in which higher-ups enjoy impunity under appearance of legality. It is well possible to administer or practice the law in a way that frustrates justice, just as these days many of our courts produce judgment without pretending to deliver justice.

This is what happened to Caroline Mojekwu. She was the widow from Nnewi in Anambra State in a very famous case known to students of family law, gender studies, customary law, and human rights laws in Nigeria and beyond.⁶ When Caroline began litigation in 1966 to assert rights to the assets left behind by her late husband, who had died nearly five years earlier, she believed in and expected the delivery of justice. By the time the judgment came through from the Court of Appeal 31 years later in 1997, she had received the benefit of the administration of law without the delivery of justice. 31 years of litigation is intolerably and unjustifiably too long for a widow to wait for justice. In the case of Gladys Ukeje, her Dad, Ogbonnaya, died in 1981. She went to court in 1983, hoping to redress her exclusion from a share in his estate merely because she was female. By the time of judgment in 2014, her father had been dead for 33 years.⁷

Caroline Mojekwu and Gladys Ukeje experienced legal practice without getting justice delivery. As lawyers, we speak glibly of “Access to Justice” with no mention of exit from it. This naturally has brought the system, processes and institutions of the justice sector into disrepute with the result that most citizens and court users are now more interested and invested in seeking extra-judicial than in judicial dispute resolution. This has in turn enabled vigilantism, self-help and jungle justice, enhancing insecurity and violence around the country.

Legal practice can be grubby business. It can also be an ennobling vocation, embodying a higher calling to the protection of human dignity and justice. As a guild of professionals, the NBA should promote the latter inclination not the former. Yet as individual practitioners, the landscape of the market shapes many in the direction of the former not the latter. At the heart of this dissonance between the ideal of the legal profession as an ancient vocation and the reality of its practitioners in our Nigerian market place are twin failures of civic virtue and professional ethics. Surely, if every actor in the justice system is going through the motions for the sake of profiting the pockets, achieving optimal subsistence or impressing a political god-father, then there is no one actually interested in guaranteeing the integrity or value of the institutions that should protect the public commons without which those pursuits cannot be sustained.

This is arguably where we are with litigants guaranteed to be stuck in court for decades unless they are politicians involved in judicializing partisan disputes. As the courts and justice system have become captured by the politicians and their disputes, any synergies in the system now exist to service this narrow tribe of the well off and political and judicial higher-ups.

Speaking about civic virtue, I should point out that a failure of ethics is not an absence of skill or knowledge but of character, formation, and socialisation.

Immanuel Kant called this “mother-wit”, a quality of deliberate and sound character which, if lacking, “no school can make good”,⁸ and explained how without this:

[a] physician, a judge, or a ruler may have at command many excellent pathological, legal or political rules even to the degree that he may become a profound teacher of them, and yet, none the less, may easily stumble in their application. For, although admirable in understanding, he may be wanting in natural power of judgement.⁹

Essentially, there has to be more to the justice system than merely the private profit motive or transaction of its operators. It was with this in mind that Anthony Kronman chose to describe the outstanding lawyer as:

a devoted citizen. He cares about the public good and is prepared to sacrifice his own well-being for it, unlike those who use the law merely to advance their private ends. …He is distinguished, too, by his special talent for discovering where the public good lies and for fashioning those arrangements needed to secure it.¹⁰

To understand how this dissonance between legal practice and administration of justice was fashioned, we need to go back a little to how we teach law and our crisis is ultimately founded in legal pedagogy.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: A CRISIS OF LEGAL PEDAGOGY

The trajectory of legal practice in post-colonial Africa was set long before independence by the lawyers educated in colonial Europe who returned to practice back in territories across the continent. Those of them from the British territories such as Nigeria mostly trained in the United Kingdom. From this, the country derived much of its legal traditions. If this sounds as if there was nothing before that, it is because as a matter of jurisprudence, there was in fact nothing. It is necessary to explain.

The first Nigerian lawyer, Christopher Sapara-Williams, was enrolled in 1888, three years after the end of the Berlin West Africa Conference. That conference, which occurred in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution, in the 44th year of the reign of Queen Victoria, ended in the General Act of the Berlin Conference. This was more than just another treaty in international law.¹¹ It also has been described as that event “which determined in important ways the future of the continent and which continues to have a profound influence on the politics of contemporary Africa”¹²

The Berlin Conference was the first international conference on Africa but no African was invited to the meeting. The invention of Africa at the conference was, therefore, accompanied by the European infantilization of Africans. Historian, Godfrey Uzoigwe, recalls that the “polite request of [Seyyid Barghash bin Said Al- Busaid] the Sultan of Zanzibar to be invited to the conference was ridiculed by Britain and was, therefore, rejected.”13

This was not entirely surprising. Half a century before the conference, influential German scholar, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, had said of Africans that there was “nothing harmonious with humanity to be found” among them,¹⁴ and of the continent itself that “it is no historical part of the world.”¹⁵ The conference promised among other things “the conservation of the indigenous populations and the amelioration of their moral and material conditions of existence.”16 Instead it delivered the opposite, producing a sustained decline in African population in the quarter century that immediately followed it until the end of the 1st World War.¹⁷  This coincided with the period of effective European occupation of Africa.

This was also the period when Europe establish the legal institutions that lawyers these days celebrate. To establish these institutions, the Europeans did two things. First, they made African expendable, liquidating as many as they could.

That process produced tragedies much of which remain largely untold, from the concentration camps of the 2nd Boer War,¹⁸ to the colonial massacres and genocides that pork-marked the period of active occupation.¹⁹ It is the continent where contemporary human rights reporting originated in the report by Roger Casement on King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo.²⁰

Second, Europeans built their occupation on the unimaginative falsehood that Africa had no living people before they arrived. It was terra nullius. So, to everything they did they ascribed a constitutive character. This is how Scot, Mungo Park, “discovered” River Niger. Today, we teach our young law students about “reception statutes” and no law teacher bothers to encourage the students to question this as a matter of moral or intellectual agency nor provide the context that makes this untenable. Essentially, the “reception” statutes was founded on the idea that Africans did not exist and had no community, institutions or notions of laws before the Europeans arrived.

The invention of Africa is today institutionalised in narrative but it started as normative inscription; a matter of law. It began in treaty law at the Berlin Conference before being established into jurisprudence. At a time when the United Kingdom was the dominant actor in the global political economy, it was no surprise that the canonical articulation of this invention was in common law. Two major events occurred between 1918 and 1919 to fix the legal contours of the invention. First, in June 1914, the Crown referred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council the question concerning who had the power between the British South African Company (BSAC) of Cecil Rhodes and the Crown over Southern Rhodesia lands (Matabeleland and Mashonaland in modern day Zimbabwe over whose territories BSAC had acquired interests through a treaty with the ruler, Lobengula) that had not been alienated by the BSAC.

When it delivered its report (judgment) four years later in 1918, the Privy Council laid out in legal doctrine the invention of Africa. In reasoning that was morbidly clinical in its inventions, the Privy Council based this doctrine on an othering of Africans that comprehensively rendered them as non-persons, denying their memory, community or agency. First, Lord Sumner (who delivered the judgment of the Court), asserted with economy that colonial occupation was not preceded by any legitimate leadership. He claimed that “no principle of legitimacy attached to the dynasty of Lobengula….”,²¹ arguing that the original owners of colonial lands whom he referred to as “aborigines” were “destitute of any recognizable form of sovereignty.”²²

Second, having denuded the peoples of Africa (Southern Rhodesia was the focus of the proceedings in this case) of civic capacity or political legitimacy, the Privy Council proceeded to clothe them with perpetual disability and an incapacity of cognition: “By the disinterested liberality of persons in this country their Lordships had the advantage of hearing the case for the natives who were themselves incapable of urging, and perhaps unconscious of possessing, any case at all.”²³

Third, by now in the full stride of his oratorical majesty, Lord Sumner went after the history and memory of Africa’s peoples and obliterated them in one sentence dripping with scorn:

“Whether the Matabele or the Mashonas of today are, in any sense consistent with the transmission or descent of rights of property, identical with the Matabele or the Mashonas of more than twenty years ago is far from clear, and the fate of the Makalakas and the Maholies, once the slaves of Lobengula, is as obscure as their original rights.”²⁴

Fourth, having wiped out their history, the Privy Council spent two short sentences doing the same to the humanity of Africans:

“Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organization that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilized society. Such a gulf cannot be bridged.”²⁵

These deprivations proved resilient post-colony. Instead of redressing them, they prospered thereafter, only pausing long enough to alter the pigments of the beneficiaries from white to black.

Fifth, having set up all these building blocks, the Privy Council mercifully put the people out of their existential misery by pronouncing – with a touch of Biblical flourish²⁶ – the coup de grace in the form of the principle of res nullius:

“By the will of the Crown and in exercise of its rights the old state of things, whatever its exact nature, as it was before 1893, has passed away and another and, as their Lordships do not doubt, a better has been established in lieu of it. Whoever now owns the unalienated lands, the natives do not.”²7

This decision also coincided with the onset of the negotiations that culminated in the following year in the Paris Conference at the end of the First World War. It was here that the second event was completed in 1919 in the adoption of the League of Nations Covenant. While the jurisprudence of Re Southern Rhodesia “invented” Africa; the League of Nations Covenant consecrated our normative dependency as a fact of international law and relations as follows:

To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization….”²⁸

The League Covenant continued:

“The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.”²⁹

Despite its best efforts, the Charter of the United Nations adopted in 1945 did not exactly end this doctrine of dependency, providing, for instance, that the former League Mandates (many of them in Africa) would be administered as Trust Territories in order “to promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of the trust territories.”³⁰ In other words, those were the political infants of a merciful world.

All of us in this room are the descendants of “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” This was how colony ruled and ruined us, essentially as infants lacking in both discernment and agency. Yet, by the end of the colonial period, we set up an infrastructure of legal training through which those who accomplished that claimed to be “sharing [their] cultural heritage.”³¹

There was, of course, no such thing. Yet, in law faculties, students are fed with tiresome diets of “Rule of Law” founded on the writings of Albert Venn Dicey and his Victorian notions of the rule of law.³² It embodies benevolent notions of predictability and equality policed under an unwritten constitution by “the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.”³³ Inherent in Dicey’s concept of the rule of law is the idea of a judiciary whose effectiveness is essentially guaranteed by their notional independence, impartiality and predictability. Dicey’s ideas were originally published in 1893, the year in which the British massacred their way through Ijebu Ode on their way to the eventual acquisition of what is today south- west Nigeria. The world that Dicey described and analysed, therefore, did not treat people like those of us in this room today as humans, and the benevolence that he took for granted as a Caucasian was unknown to the interaction between his people and colonial subjects. This certainly was the case in Africa.

The law they set up, therefore, was a body of norms that normalized the expendability of our ancestors as non-persons. By the time of independence, that normalization had become a habit. Instead of committing to building institutions to alter that trajectory, the post-colonial inheritors doubled down on the martial habits the Europeans created and we curated local jurisprudence to elevate it. Today, there is hardly any atrocity that cannot find justification in precedent or jurisprudence, both colonial and post-colonial. This is how we ended up with the present described as I began this conversation. The institutions we glamorize were fundamentally not configured to deliver justice to Africans.

ON THE HORN OF A REVOLUTION

Richard Susskind begins the introduction to the 2nd edition of his book Tomorrow’s Lawyers, with the following assertion: Legal institutions and lawyers are at a crossroads, I claim, and will change more radically in less than two decades than they have over the last two centuries. If you are a young lawyer, this revolution will happen on your watch.³⁴

Few places advertise the truism of this assertion more powerfully than Nigeria and in more ways than one.

Asked about the secret of his success, Canadian Ice Hockey legend, Wayne Gretzky, famously quipped, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In football, former England international, Gary Lineker, counselled strikers aspiring for greatness to “attack the space” where the ball is headed. For the Nigerian lawyer today, a good part of the challenge of adapting for the future is to figure out where the legal practice is headed or where the space will be. To do this, we must begin by understanding where we are coming from.

First, the context for the evolution of the legal profession in Nigeria has been indexed on dependency. The oldest institutions in the country, the uniformed services of the police and the army, date back to 1861 and predate even the partition of Africa. The major institutions of our legal system were created under colonial rule and the principal adaptations to them were made under military rule. In 137 years of the legal profession in Nigeria, the country has been ruled by unaccountable white people and unaccountable soldiers for under 35 years. The first Chief Justice of Nigeria to be appointed by a president elected by Nigerians, for instance, was George Sodeinde Sowemimo in 1983 and the first Chief Justice who did not serve under unelected government was Salihu Alpha Belgore in 2006. The consequences of such long periods of impunity for a profession whose internal governance is substantially dependent on precedent are very deleterious.

Second, developments in the political economy have become major drivers of change in legal practice. For the most part, legal practice at the cutting edge in Nigeria has largely benefitted from the emergence of a petro-economy in the 1970s. However, as developments in new forms of energy and concerns over climate and sustainability compel the world to wean itself from dependence on dirty hydro-carbons, the oil companies are shrinking in power relative to their counterparts in innovation, knowledge and ICTs. In Nigeria, the structure of the economy is poised to change as a result of this over the next quarter century as oil evolves away from being the mainstay of the economy. This will, of course, impact on the economy around which legal practice is built. In addition in south-east Nigeria, demographic pressures are going to focus attention to land use, land occupancy, and land conflicts, with consequences for coexistence and food (in)security. This is our present reality, and it could get worse if there is no course correction.

Turning around cultures ingrained from prolonged periods of unaccountable rule at the best of times is difficult. Achieving that in a context of deepening immiseration within a transitional economy will come at some cost. As institutions are degraded by impunity and livelihoods are degraded by transitional economy, hardships will create new markets in violence. Thirdly, therefore, the combined consequence of the first and second factors, is that in the near term, violence will continue to define legal practice in these parts. Politicians will need merchants of violence for their elections; who will in turn demand levity and impunity from the politicians. As these happen, ideas of propriety will suffer and violence could prosper, at least in the short term. When this happens, public service becomes an organised criminal enterprise and public office becomes attractive to criminals. As Paul Collier makes clear:

Evidently, one reason elected office is more attractive to criminals than to the honest is that only the criminals will take advantage of the opportunities for corruption. But there is a further reason: elected office provides immunity from prosecution.³⁵

In this kind of situation, criminal politicians, crooked lawyers and judges, bent law enforcement agents and prosecutors will make progress faster than decent professionals. That age is already with us. For all the young people to whom the future belongs, however, the real question is how long they are willing to let this last.

Fourth, a major impulsion for change is the demographic trends at the Bar. In 1988, the enrolled population of the Nigerian Bar hit 12,000. By 2013, it was 100,000. Today, we are about to top 200,000. Put differently, it took the Nigerian legal profession 100 years to enrol the first 12,000 lawyers but approximately 25 years to enrol the next 100,000. At the current rate of growth, the next 100,000 lawyers in Nigeria will arrive in less than half the time it took the profession to move from 12,000 to 100,000. This exponential increase in the number of lawyers in Nigeria has not necessarily been achieved through a massive increase in investment in the infrastructure of legal education. Existing facilities have been distended beyond their unnatural elasticity with adverse consequences for quality of instruction and products both at the foundational and professional levels. In 2017, for instance, of 55 law faculties and departments in Nigeria, only one – University of Lagos – had full accreditation with the Council of Legal Education. Two – Benue State and Lagos State Universities – had their accreditation suspended, while the remainder had partial accreditation.36 This is often communicated as if it means that young lawyers are inherently less able that their predecessors. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that the older generations have failed younger lawyers in not preparing adequately for foreseeable growth patterns.

Fifth, to some extent, the consequences of such failures have been ameliorated by developments in new technologies but they are also about to be accentuated by them. The study of how technology will change professions and legal practice is increasingly a specialised skill and it will be impossible to even sketch the full profundity of its reach in the brief space available here. In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurtzweil warns us that the march of technology is poised towards what he calls “singularity”, a development that will radically transform “every institution and aspect of human life.”37 According to Kurtzweil, singularity represents:

“a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future.”³⁸

This, he predicts, will occur, as a result of the pace of the information revolution in its intersection with three emerging fields – genetics, nanotechnology and robotics and artificial intelligence.

The early signs of these developments are already being seen in the field of humanitarian law with the spectre of de-personalisation of war and its instruments. In her January 2017 article in the Harvard International Review, Veronica Ma cautions that:

[T]he depersonalization of warfare lowers the stakes of declaring war in the first place. Therefore, with regards to international law and the long-term goals of military programs, automated warfare may be self-defeating and even counterintuitive.”³⁹

It is also changing the face of legal practice and revenue streams from it. A client seeking to do a will today, for instance, can easily go to any number of online platforms that can easily work them through the process of DIY wills at no cost. In the near term, Algorithms will come into being to provide solutions for many legal tasks in the form of applications. The revenue will no longer lie in the service but in intellectual property-based revenues in a pricing framework based on volumes not margins.

Developments in both technology and markets are driving a sixth factor – the regulatory environment for lawyering is changing with increasing liberalization all geared towards greater cost-efficiency and value for money for the recipient of legal services. The client is now increasingly seen as the consumer. Where in the past legal services were mostly bespoke, they are now increasingly commoditized. In England, the Legal Services Act, which implemented Sir David Clementi’s 2004 report on the Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales, established the Alternative Business Structures (ABS), authorizing non- lawyers to nevertheless provide legal business and service. In justifying his case for a different regulatory framework, Sir David argued:

The business structures through which legal services are delivered to the public have changed little over a considerable period. The most easily recognisable structure is the high street solicitor, practicing either on his own or in partnership with other solicitors. But business practices have changed. In particular the skills necessary to run a modern legal practice have developed; but whilst those with finance or IT skills may sit on the management committee of a legal firm, they are not permitted to be principals in the business. There is concern also about whether the restrictive practices of the main legal professional bodies can still be justified, in particular those which prevent different types of lawyers working together on an equal footing. There is pressure for change from those who represent consumer interests, but also from many in the legal profession, particularly the Law Society who have made a strong case for liberalisation of law practices.⁴⁰

This regulatory environment could play hide-and-seek with ethical standards. Artificial Intelligence is already doing this as shown in the recent decision in Ayinde v. London Borough of Haringey.41 In that case, the presiding judge felt compelled to refer for disciplinary action a Barrister who relied on five fake court cases as authorities. The court felt compelled to rule: “I consider that providing a fake description of five fake cases, including a Court of Appeal case, qualifies quite clearly as professional misconduct.”⁴²

Seventh, in addition, the economic laws of regional integration are increasingly impinging on legal practice through avenues that increasingly make cross-border legal practice possible and likely on scale. Together, these factors are changing the face of legal practice in ways that were unimaginable only a generation ago.

THERE ARE WOMEN AT THE BAR – THE CHANGING WORLD OF GENDER AND THE LAW

A major feature of the demographic evolution of the Bar is the growth in the number and participation of women at the Bar. It is important to offer a few words on this development at this juncture. Historically, the Bar as a profession was misogynistic. When it denied Myra Bradwell a licence to practice law in 1871, the Supreme Court of Illinois gave the following as its reasons:

It is to be also remembered that female attorneys at law were unknown in England, and a proposition that a woman should enter the courts of Westminster Hall in that capacity, or as a barrister, would have created hardly less astonishment than one that she should ascend the bench of bishops, or be elected to a seat in the House of Commons. It is to be further remembered, that when our act was passed, that school of reform which claims for women participation in the making and administering of the laws had not then arisen, or, if here and there a writer had advanced such theories, they were regarded rather as abstract speculations than as an actual basis for action. That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth. In view of these facts, we are certainly warranted in saying that when the legislature gave to this court the power of granting licenses to practice law, it was with not the slightest expectation that this privilege would be extended to women.⁴³

In affirming this decision, the Supreme Court of the United States reasoned that:

[T]he natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life [such as lawyering]. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood.”⁴⁴

In 1914, the courts in England denied a brilliant Oxford graduate access to membership of the Law Society because she was female.45 In Nigeria, Stella Thomas became the first female lawyer in 1935, 47 years after the enrolment of Christopher Sapara-Williams in 1888. She was also the first female Magistrate in Nigeria, appointed in 1943. Justice Modupe Omo-Eboh became the first female High Court judge in the country in 1969. Chief Folake Solanke took Silk in 1981 as the first Nigerian woman to do so; and Chief Priscilla Kuye remains so far the only woman to have been President of the Nigerian Bar Association in 1991.

Justice Aloma Mukhtar became Chief Justice in 2012. The current Chief Justice, need I say, is also female.

Notwithstanding these landmarks, our Bar still remains mostly a male redoubt. The country has never before produced a female Attorney-General of the Federation. Helena Kennedy QC rightly cautions that:

With the increased numbers of young women in the law schools and the legal profession, with a growing number of women receiving appointments to the Bench, we can be seduced into the premature conclusion that the systemic problems have been solved and it is now just a question of more women working their way through the profession. The illusion of inclusion can deny the reality that professional structures still do not adequately accommodate the reality of women’s lives. The conjuring trick with numbers can disguise the fact that certain attitudes to women remain unchanged and that women coming before the courts still encounter myths and stereotypes which disfigure the legal process.⁴⁶

An updating of the attitudes and habits of the Bar on gender equality is overdue. As more women have entered the law, the structures of the profession have evolved. Today, arguably a majority of the students in the law faculties and the Law School are female. They are also outperforming the boys in school.

Women also now dominate the public service positions in law even though the position of Attorney-General of the Federation appears to remain a female-free zone. It seems that:

For those determined to enter legal practice, the majority (of women) are steered towards public service law…. The men make career choices much more related to money and prestige and head for high-rewarding areas of practice, but women find their place in poor folks’ law.⁴⁷

As judicial positions are now mostly selected from the ranks of public servants, women have increasingly become more prominent on the Bench in many States of Nigeria. In Lagos, the majority of both the High Court and the Magistracy are women.

A WORD ABOUT THE FUTURE – SO, WHERE IS THE LEGAL PRACTICE PUCK HEADED?

The developments outlined above are changing the face of legal practice in profound ways. In Nigeria, we are still arguing for protection. In the 21st century, ICTs, regulation and developments in cross-border lawyering increasingly make our position untenable. Until now, young lawyers have been able to subsist on the margins of jobs in areas like landlord-tenant, conveyancing, and corporate services and retail contracting. These are some of the areas that could be most affected by new developments in the economy.

Until now, lawyering in Nigeria has mostly consisted of providing customised services to specific clients who pay for such. It has mostly been uni- sourced. The pricing strategy for lawyering services has been based on equilibriating margins – well-heeled clients are billed more and the fees from them somewhat subsidise the less well-paying clients. A commoditized model of lawyering with a model of fees based on volumes has not much been contemplated until now. That age may yet be upon us sooner than we realise.

The developments in wider political and knowledge economies are poised to re-shape legal practice and only the most prepared and adaptable can survive.

Algorithms and applications are likely to become major factors in the delivery of legal services. For instance, 20 years ago, Nick Szabo first proposed the idea “smart contracts” which he defined as:

New institutions, and new ways to formalize the relationships that make up these institutions, now made possible by the digital revolution. I call these new contracts “smart”, because they are far more functional than their inanimate paper-based ancestors. No use of artificial intelligence is implied. A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.⁴⁸

Today, the BlockChain contract, as a model of smart contracts has become a digital application operated on peer-to-peer networks for may online transactions.

Robert Susskind identifies a process he calls the de-composition of legal practice as a result of which lawyering services now have up to 16 kinds of sources. These sources include de-lawyering, outsourcing, off-shoring, near- shoring (cross-border), sub-contracting, leasing, open-sourcing, crowd-sourcing and knowledge-management-sourcing. These have different kinds of implications for the lawyer. Take de-lawyering for instance. ICT solutions will increasingly de- lawyer the landlord-tenant field. For instance, models like Fibre.ng aggregate tenant communities into co-operatives in which enforcement action is not needed. Tenants who default are simply shut out by electronic denial of access.⁴⁹

In the field of transactions, many of the processes that are today done by lawyers can increasingly be done remotely by Algorithms supplied with the right information and training. Lawyers who think consumers rather than clients may be able to re-locate their revenue streams onto mass lawyering models that de-lawyer processes, such as compliance in various fields but empower the consumer who saves money and time for a small fee paid towards intellectual property or access to an application. Partnerships between lawyers as subject matter experts, communications experts as content mediators, and software builders as engineers for delivery vehicles are increasingly going to be viable. Presently, for most lawyers, the law is a vocation. In the near future, it will also become a service or a fusion enterprise.

This will present significant challenges for education, professional regulation and ethics. Nigeria’s educational system is not configured for this future. We will need to re-think and re-equip it for this challenge. Whether we care to do so is open to question. This needs to happen not merely at the tertiary level but, even more importantly, at the level of basic education. The skills and habits we give to children at these levels will be dispositive. At the tertiary and vocational levels, it will be necessary to re-think the Law School. At present, a lot of resources go into it. However, the Law School can be incrementally de-institutionalised and the money presently appropriated for it can go into developing regulatory functions of the Council for Legal Education. Providers can be licensed for the instruction that it gives and the Bar enlisted in a partnership to host the mandatory Bar Dinners. The providers can prepare and present their enrollees for the Bar Exams. Over time, the providers that do well will stay in business and those that don’t will perish. The CLE can grow revenues through this process for both the public purse and for development of legal research and technology in Nigeria.

Turning to the regulation of the profession, it is regrettable that the implications of this future have not yet exercised the leadership of the Bar and the profession. The last review of the structure of legal practice in Nigeria was around the time of Independence. Another review is long overdue. The Legal Practitioners Act is an inadequate piece of legislation for where we are. While a law to govern the legal profession remains always needed, a law to regulate the market in legal services is even more important. At the moment, the former is portrayed as dispensing with the need for the latter. By this conflation, the State and its institutions are deployed in rigging the market in legal services in a way that undermines competition and does not offer the customer price efficiency. Such a review will also address the updating of the rules of professional ethics for the digital environment while also creating effective regime for market regulation and governance.

But it shall nary profit us to have material wealth but not the country in which to enjoy it. In the end, the future of the legal practice and justice delivery will be built not on what lawyers do, but on what citizens allow. It is a precondition for membership of the Nigerian Bar that the person proposed should first be Nigerian. That comes with obligations to elevate our gaze sometimes, if not quite often, beyond motives of profit and money in every case. In this, we have as a vocation been derelict, both individually and collectively. I say nothing of the judiciary for the moment. The compounded effects of this collective dereliction(s) have caught up with us with dreadful consequences. To assure a future, we must first care enough to course-correct. For those who are willing to contemplate that, a future may exist. If that number adds up to a critical mass, then that future should be promising.

ENDONTES

1.  Ph.D. (London-LSE), Professor of Practice, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Pro-Chancellor & Chair of Governing Council, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu University, Anambra State, Nigeria; Chair, Board of Directors, International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI), New York/Kampala; Chair, Advisory Board, Global Rights. Text for Keynote, Law Week, Nigerian Bar Association, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, 21 May, 2021.
2. Sam Momah, Nigeria Beyond Divorce: Amalgamation in Action, xxiii-xxvii (2013)
3. Ernest Rennan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882), cited in T. Baycroft, Nationalism in Europe, 1989-1945, 32 (1998)
4. Id.
5. Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, London, New York, Harper Collins, 5 (1999)
6. Mojekwu v. Mojekwu, [1997] 7 NWLR 283
7. Ukeje v. Ukeje (2014) 11 NWLR (PT.1418) 384
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans, Norman K. Smith (1974), A/133/B/1729
9. Cited in Anthony Kronman, The Lost Lawyer: Falling Ideals of the Legal Profession (1995), 45-46
10. Id., p. 1411 See, General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, adopted 26 February, 1885, reprinted in 3 AJIL (Supplement), 7 (1909) (hereafter called
11. See “General Act of Berlin”)
12. Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004); 91
13. G.N. Uzoigwe, “Reflections on the Berlin West Africa Conference, 1884-85”, XII:3-4 Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 9 at 10 (1984-85)
14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (J Sibree, Trans) (New York, American Dome Library Co, 1902), 150
15. Id., 157
16. General Act of Berlin, Art. 6
17. Sybil Crow, The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885, (Longmans & Green London, 1942), 4-5
18. See, Elizabethaven Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History, (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2013)
19. See, Dominik Schaller, “Genocide and Mass Violence in the ‘Heart of Darkness’: Africa in the Colonial Period”, in Donald Bloxham & A Dirk Moses (Eds), Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, (Oxford, Oxford Academic Books, 2012), 345; Jurgen Zimmerer, “Colonial Genocide: The Herero and Nama War (1904–8) in German South West Africa and Its Significance” in Dan Stone, (ed), The Historiography of Genocide, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 323.20
20. CD. 1809, Despatch to Certain of His Majesty’s Representatives Abroad in Regard to Alleged Cases of Ill-Treatment of Natives and to the Existence of Trade Monopolies in the Independent State of the Congo, Africa, No. 14 (1903) [House of Commons, Accounts and Papers, Vol. 62. 1904]
21. Re Southern Rhodesia, (1919) AC 212 at 215
22. Id.
23. Id., 232
24. Id., 233
25. Id.
26. The Privy Council almost certainly adapted this from Corinthians 5:17 (King James Version)
27. Re Southern Rhodesia, (n24), 235
28. League of Nations Covenant, Article 22
29. Id
30. Charter of the United Nations, Art 76(b)
31. Lord Denning, “Legal Education in Africa: Sharing our Cultural Heritage,” 58 Law Society Gazette, 147 (1961)
32. A.V. Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, (J.W.F. Allison, Ed.), (Oxford University Press, 2013) 1st edition.
33. Id. 
34. Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future, 2nd Edition, xvii (2017)
35. Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, p. 27 (2009)
36. “List of Accredited and Approved Law Faculties in Nigeria as at 2017”, available at https://thenigerialawyer.com/list-of- accredited-and-approved-faculties-of-law-in-nigeria-as-at-2017/
37. Ray Kurtzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, p. 24 (2005) 
38. Id.
39. Veronica Ma, “The Ethics and Implications of Modern Warfare: Robotic Systems and Human Optimization”, Harvard Int’l Rev, Jan 16, 2017, available at http://hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=144948 
40. David Clementi, Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Wales, Final Report, pp. 2-3 (2007
41. [2025] EWHC 1040(Admin)
42. Id., para 64
43. Bradwell v. Illinois, 93 US 130 at 132-133
44. Id., 141
45. Gwyneth Bebb v. Law Society, (1914), I Ch. 286
46. Helena Kennedy QC, Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice, pp. 1-2 (1992)
47. Id. p. 3
48. Nick Szabo, “Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets”, Extropy #16 (1996), now available on http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/sma rt_contracts_2.html
49. Robert Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyer, supra, pp. 36-37.

 

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