Speaker Series: Rabiat Akande

The final years of British imperial rule in Northern Nigeria witnessed efforts to source appropriate models of legal modernization from the Muslim world. The models afloat in constitutional discourse, those of Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and Egypt, were held up by respective proponents as ideal for resolving the long-fraught question of the relationship between Islam and public law in a modern state. Yet, the evocations of these foreign models were idealized imaginaries; by framing these models as settled facts, the Northern Nigerian evocations flattened the constitutional experience of these states and obscured unfolding struggles over the nature of legal modernity. Against the backdrop of contestations between juristic and political elites, colonial officials, and other actors, this paper chronicles the outsourcing of Northern Nigeria’s legal modernization to foreign imaginaries. Even as the Northern Nigerian legal borrowing debate fielded competing visions of decolonization and modernization, that discourse limited the realm of possibilities to an uncritical and, in the end, imaginary copying from postcolonial jurisdictions. The ultimate consequence was the trumping of juristic power by political authority and the foreclosure of emancipatory possibilities for the future of law.

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Rabiat Akande (she/her) joined the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in 2024. She works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society.

Professor Akande is the author of Entangled Domains: Empire, Law, and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press: 2023). Her work has also appeared in the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of Law and Religion, Law and History Review, the Supreme Court Review, and in volumes by Cambridge University Press, University of Toronto Press, and University of Virginia Press. Currently, she is co-editing an encyclopedia of law and religion (Elgar Publishing: under contract), an African international law reader, and a volume on African international legal history. She is also at work on a book exploring Malcolm X’s intellectual legacy titled Malcolm X, Black Globalism, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism.

Professor Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha with the support of the African Union and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among other institutions.