THE SUPERIORITY CONTEST BETWEEN LEGISLATION AND JUDICIAL PRECEDENT AS SOURCES OF NIGERIAN LAW

Abstract

Judicial precedent is an age-long feature of municipal judicial systems of the common law including Nigeria. The review of the practice in Nigeria reveals that it serves the cause of justice and makes predictability of the outcome of legal suits possible. Legislation are laws made by law making bodies. Overtime, there has been debate about the superiority of legislation over judicial precedent and the other way round. This article aims at analyzing the superiority contest between legislation and judicial precedent as sources of Nigerian laws. The doctrinal research method was adopted, and the data collected were both primary and secondary comprising of both hard copies and online source materials. It was discovered that the superiority of legislation over judicial precedent or vice versa is based on which of them is recent in time about the subject matter in question. Where legislation is made subsequently to override a judicial precedent, then it is assumed that the legislators intended it to be superior, but where the courts make a pronouncement to be contrary to the position of a statute to remedy a lacuna, then it is assumed that the courts intended the precedent to be superior. It is recommended that there should be a synergy between the legislators and judges to ensure that judicial precedents made to remedy a lacuna are incorporated and enacted as part of the law and vice versa.