Recruitment and Tenure of Supreme Court Justices in Nigeria

Abstract

One of the most compelling indicators of the institutionalization of the Supreme Court of Nigeria is the stabilization and autonomy of its recruitment regime, particularly during the last three decades. This uncommon development among final courts of appeal in Africa deserves close scrutiny, first, to assess its integrity or tenuousness; second, to identify recruitment preferences, and their impact on the policy output of the Court; and thirdly, whether the extant recruitment regime satisfies political demands for representation, or equity, and therefore engenders institutional support from the court’s attentive and mass publics. This paper compares the regime with the United States Supreme Court and three leading final courts in the Commonwealth: the South African Constitutional Court, and the supreme courts of Canada and India respectively. The Supreme Court of Nigeria was inaugurated only six years after the Indian Supreme Court, and is much older than the Constitutional Court of South Africa. But it has attracted far less scholarly attention. This paper discusses the evolution of the Nigerian Court, stabilization of its recruitment preferences, and turnover and diversity of its bench. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the progressive institutionalization of the Court.