Taslim Olawale Elias's intellectual and juristic legacy remains unparalleled in many material respects. He left a remarkable body of work, as an African legal scholar in London in the years between the late 1940s and Nigerian independence, as a legal administrator while he served as Nigeria's first Attorney General and Minister for Justice, among his achievements as the dean of the new faculty of law at the University of Lagos, and as a national and international judge. Born on 11 November 1914 in Lagos, Nigeria, into a family of merchants, he began formal schooling at the age of 12, a fact that was greatly overshadowed by a prodigious academic performance and by the plethora of distinctions and accolades (including sixteen honorary degrees in four continents and a host of national and international honours) that he would acquire during his indefatigable study and practice of the law, and in his contributions to its evolution.
He studied at London University (LL B, 1946; LL M, 1947; Ph.D., 1949; BA, 1954; and LL D, 1962) and at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. He was a Yarborough-Andersen Scholar of the Inner Temple (1946–9) before he was called to the English Bar in April 1947. In the course of his studies he was granted scholarships by the University of London (1946) and the Inner Temple (1947–9); fellowships by UNESCO (1951–3), the University of Manchester (1951–3), and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Oxford (1954–6); and the Oppenheimer Research Fellowship by Nuffield College, Oxford University (1957–60). He was appointed Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law and Political Science by Delhi University, India (1956) and a member of the governing council of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London (1957). Following his marriage to fellow lawyer Ganiat Yetunde Fowosere and his return to Nigeria in 1960, he was conferred Queen's Counsel in 1961.
The mind boggles somewhat as to how an African living in England in the 1950s was able to accomplish so much at the level at which he did, so consistently. Imagination suggests that he was indeed the robust individual identified in the obituary which appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Accounts of him by those who knew him in the years before he left Lagos to study law in England on the one hand, and those of him as a Londoner and thereafter on the other, suggest that he was barely changed by his sojourn of some fifteen years, until 1960, away from his beloved Lagos. He was at once an unaffected Anglophile and a subtle but thoroughgoing Lagos Islander throughout much of our recollection of him. His predilection for tea was as natural as his love for Isale-Eko – where he was born in 1914 – with no affectations in either case – he was far too rigorous to have become limp-wristed in this way. He spoke with no evident colorations, and he wrote with the elegance and precision one must recognize from the times in which he lived.
His academic background and skills as a consummate administrator and statesman spurred a plurality of national and international positions in, among others, the Organization of African Unity, various organs of the United Nations, and other international fora, spanning almost half a century. A member of the UN International Law Commission from 1961 to 1975, he served as chair of the Committee of the Whole at the UN Convention on the Law of Treaties in 1969. He led the Nigerian delegations to the conferences held to consider the Draft Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States in 1963, and to the Special Committee on the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in 1964. He was a member of the UN Committee of Experts which drafted the constitution of the Congo in 1961–2. He helped to draft the charter of the Organization of African Unity and its Protocol of Mediation, Conciliation, and Arbitration.
First and foremost, however, he was a scholar, teacher, pioneer, and researcher, and the prolific author of a formidable multifaceted body of published legal works, several of which remain valid points of reference. He held a professorship and was dean of the faculty of law of the University of Lagos between 1966 and 1972 and was a member of the governing council of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, between 1959 and 1966, while serving successive governments following Nigeria's independence as its first Attorney General (1960–72) and Minister for Justice (1960–6), Commissioner for Justice (1967–72), and later, between 1972 and 1975, as Chief Justice of the federation. His probity, commitment to the rule of law, contributions to the law and to legal education and the administration of justice earned him national and international awards including, in Nigeria, the title of Commander of the Federal Republic (1963), the Nigerian National Merit Award (1976), and the title of Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (1985).
The vicissitudes of Nigeria's turbulent political youth left him mostly unscathed. The circumstances of the transition from service as chief justice to the subsequent achievement of international judgeship are proof that he was destined for things even higher than first national judicial officer. A member of various international legal associations, in 1975 he was elected president of the World Association of Judges, succeeding Earl Warren, the US Chief Justice in 1953–69. On 17 November of the same year, he was elected a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, before which he had, 13 years earlier, acted as leading counsel representing the Organization of African Unity and Nigeria in the celebrated Namibia case. Appointed in 1987 to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, he achieved the distinctions of vice-president (1979–82), acting president (1981–2), and president (1982–5) of the International Court of Justice at The Hague – the first African jurist to hold that honour. He died in Lagos, following a brief illness, on 14 August 1991.
He was an unassuming man, yet his sense of right and wrong was uncompromising. He was unable to see himself as necessarily special, and it was much easier for him to have identified his achievements with either destiny or divine intervention – or perhaps both in some cases. Our own view – that his genuine character and above all his truly remarkable personal discipline are his primary attributes – is manifest in the fact that he served every government of Nigeria from independence until his appointment to the International Court, and that he was always able to identify the bigger picture.
