Jurisdictional Reform and the Role of the Supreme Court of Nigeria — The Path to a Policy Court

Abstract

The Supreme Court of Nigeria is a system under severe stress. Unless the present caseload pressure is released somehow, the system will buckle imminently. Signs of stress are clearly obvious: overwhelming arrears of work, limited collegiality, and unsatisfactory output quality. As an organization, the Court has changed little during the last half-century; it has adapted to new challenges and changing roles almost without any significant structural or operational alteration. Samuel Huntington suggested that, whether an organization outlives its original functions is an indicator of the adaptability of that organization, a benchmark of institutionalization. Within its first decade, the Supreme Court evolved from a colonial intermediate court of appeal, subordinate to the Privy Council, to a final court of appeal, and shed almost all the original jurisdiction initially associated with it. During the next decade it was not just a final court of appeal, but the only appellate court for most of the country. This status of a first-level appellate court meant that it continued to function very much as it did earlier as an intermediate court of appeal even though its role was now that of a final court of appeal. There was no change in caseload volume or variety either. This ensured that the dominant functional orientation of the Supreme Court of Nigeria was always error-correction. In reaction to its caseload crisis, the Court’s bench has ballooned to the present sixteen, and there is a present temptation to enlarge it further. With increasing delay in processing its caseload and growing volume of fresh cases, this solution is utterly ineffective. This paper links the caseload crisis to the persistence of the Court’s error-correcting orientation: without a policy-court jurisdictional reform, the gap between the Court’s output and its caseload will continue to expand. This paper draws on the experience of the supreme courts of Canada and India respectively for lessons of successful and unsuccessful discretionary jurisdiction reform.