SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Nigeria is a federation of twelve States each of which is competent, according to the Constitutional allocation of legislative powers, to make laws practically on all matters , of family relations. The municipal law of each State comprises one system of territorial (Western-type) law and another system of non-territorial (Customary or Moslem) law,. There is not only multiplicity in the bodies of the latter system in each of most of the States, but the system itself contains institutions more unusual than those the legal systems of Western civilization are accustomed to dealing with. Yet the world's modern technological developments, and recent upward trends in the economic development in Nigeria, are bringing peoples and diverse legal institutions far closer together. The mobility of population, and hence the possibility of complex legal relations, is greatly facilitated at the interstate level by the consitutional guarantee of the right of movement within the federation to all persons who are legally within one part of it. These factors of federalism, dualism of system of law, diversity of legal institution and the mobility of our time, have jointly made Nigeria a special problem area for the study of conflicts of laws. In this pioneering work, an attempt is made not merely to state the existing rules of Nigerian private international law of family relations in the context of the above phenomena. An analytical approach is linked with a discussion on the prospective development of the law in the fields covered by the work. In these circumstances, the work cannot be anything but comparative. Chapter One deals with the sources and development of the Nigerian private international law of family relations. Chapter two considers Domicile as a Jurisdictional and choice of law concept. In Chapter Three, the problem of the choice of the applicable laws in the formation of both monogamous and polygamous marriages is considered. Chapter Four is devoted to an examination of the Choice of the system of Court, Basis of Jurisdiction, Choice of the applicable Law and Recognition of sister-state and foreign decrees, as regards the dissolution of both types of marriage. Chapter Five is a discussion on the concept of Legitimacy under the domestic laws in Nigeria as a prelude to an appreciation of Legitimacy in its, conflicts of laws, a subject which is discussed iii Chapter Six, Chapter Seven is on Adoption, Chapters Eight and Nine concern Administration of Estates and Succession respectively; while the Postscript considers the effect of a recent Nigerian Decree on few of the matters discussed in Chapters Two and Four.