Varsities Talk: So you want to be a lawyer? Be careful the university you attend (2)

 
“0817-300-2683. My Dear Dele, Please help us find out if Afe Babalola University has accreditation for Law – not provisional accreditation. We have a daughter wanting to read law there. Thanks! From Chief J.O.A  Ayomike. Warri.

Of all the disciplines, none had been as badly treated as the Faculty of Law in most universities. As a matter of fact, it might not be far-fetched to call what many universities call their Law Faculty as a 419 joint. Each time I sneak into a university purporting to teach law, one of the places I must visit is the Law Faculty. There, I would proceed to read the names on the office doors of the Faculty members – as well as note how many there are.

Nigerians would weep bitterly if they know how scantily staffed most of the law faculties are. Furthermore, almost invariably, the members of the academic staff are not among the legal luminaries known to Nigerians either in practice or in academia. Some could not even practice successfully as “Charge and Bail” operators at the Igbosere High Court in Lagos. That is understandable. An Olisa Agbakoba, Wale Olanipekun or Yususf Ali, all SANs, would mint more naira in one day than any university would pay him in six months to lecture. So what the Law Faculties get, with the exception of a few top notch law teachers, are the dregs of the law profession.

Additionally, most Nigerian lawyers, including our SANs, are Jacks of all trades – they practise all types of law. The same fellow is into tort, contracts, crime, divorce, corporate law, human rights, constitutional law, chieftaincy affairs, land dispute, electoral tribunals and if permitted, maritime law and international law.

One of our legal luminaries who argued the Presidential election dispute between Awolowo and Shagari persuaded President Obasanjo that he could win the case on Bakassi at the World Court. Nigeria lost a case which we should never have been involved with and we lost Bakassi as well. That sort of “know-it-all” is frequently brought into teaching law at our universities because there is a glaring deficit of experts on various branches of law.

I received first hand education on specialization in law practice through my first wife – a white American, (Colonel/Arc. Asenuga, rtd, is my witness. His wife and my former wife were female members of the Pan-African Students of America, PASOA in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA in the 1960s to early 1970s). My wife’s father was named Corbin and nobody went to any Law School in the USA without reading CORBIN ON CONTRACT.

He devoted all his life to the study of contracts and he never stepped into a court, except to provide expert advice on a complicated case involving contracts. He was not alone. There are literally thousands of lawyers in the USA who specialize exclusively in one branch of law and who conduct the research which break new grounds in the teaching and interpretation of law – unlike Nigeria where people put on their wigs to appear in court on any matter if the price is right.

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