International records / OpenAlex research

The Work of a Nigerian Magistrate's Court

Judicial statistics are frequently non-existent, or at best patchy, in developing countries. This note contains some very basic information—of the sort that in some places one might well find in published statistics—about the cases dealt with by a magistrate's court in Zaria, in one of the northern states of Nigeria during a six-month period in the early 1970s. The purpose of the study was to try to find the answers to some very elementary questions about the functioning of this part of the legal system such as: what sorts of cases were courts of this type trying? how long did the cases take? …