Outsourcing Legal Modernity: Late Colonial Constitutionalism in Muslim Northern Nigeria

Abstract 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 Article chronicles the outsourcing of Northern Nigeria’s legal modernization to foreign imaginaries. Even as the Northern Nigerian legal borrowing debates were conducted in the language of (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.