Taslim Olawale Elias

Taslim Olawale Elias (11 November 1914 – 14 August 1991) was a Nigerian jurist who served as minister of Justice and attorney-general of Nigeria from 1960 to 1966, Chief Justice of Nigeria from 1972 to 1975 and president of the International Court of Justice from 1982 to 1985. He was a scholar who modernised and extensively revised the laws of Nigeria.

Early life and education Taslim Olawale Elias was born into the traditional aristocracy of Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, on 11 November 1914. He received his secondary education at the Church Missionary Society Grammar School and Igbobi College in Lagos. He married Ganiat Yetunde Fowosere, and the couple would have five children together (three sons, including Olufemi Elias a lawyer, and two daughters). After passing the Cambridge School Certificate examination, he worked as an assistant in the Government Audit Department. In 1935 he joined the Nigerian Railway and served in the Chief Accountant's Office for nine years.

In 1951, Elias was awarded a UNESCO Fellowship to undertake research into the legal, economic, and social problems of Africa. Later that year he had his first academic appointment, the Simon Senior Research Fellow at Manchester University. There he was an instructor in law and social anthropology. It was also in 1951 that he published his first book, Nigerian Land Law and Custom. He continued his research into Nigerian law and published Groundwork of Nigerian Law in the same year.

He returned to London in 1957 and was appointed a governor of the School of Oriental and African Studies. As the constitutional and legal adviser to the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (which later became the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens), he participated in the 1958 Nigerian Constitutional Conference in London. He was one of the architects of Nigeria's independence constitution He served in this capacity through the whole of the first republic. Although later dismissed after the coup d'état in January 1966, he was reinstated in November of that year.

In addition to contributing to Nigerian and African law, Elias had long been active in the field of international law. He was a member of the United Nations International Law Commission from 1961 to 1975, he served as General Rapporteur from 1965 to 1966 and was its chairman in 1970.

In 1966, Elias was appointed professor and dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lagos. Four years earlier he had received the LLD degree from the University of London for his work on African law and British colonial law. (He would go on to receive a total of 17 honorary doctorate degrees from various universities around the world Several of his works on various legal subjects in Lagos, Nigeria.