The Administration of Criminal Justice in the United States and the Federal Republic of Nigeria: A Comparison

The initial point of inquiry into any legal system entails the designation of that system as having either a civil law tradition, a common law tradition or a socialist law tradition.A nation which embraces the civil law tradition-the most dominant legal tradition-reflects the complex origins and varied developments of Ancient Roman civil law, canon law, commercial law, European revolutions and the concept of legal science.'The common law tradition originated approximately in 1066 A.D. as a result of the Norman Conquest of Britain, 2 while the socialist law tradition is generally assumed to have had its beginnings in the Russian Revolution. 3 The two legal systems analyzed in this paper are those of the United States and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, both of which have adopted strains of the English common law system.The focus will be on each nation's criminal justice system as it relates to the various protections afforded criminals from the time of detention or arrest, until trial.Because American criminal jurisprudence is more familiar than that of Nigeria, the author will more fully examine the latter's criminal justice system, and compare it with its American counterpart where appropriate.Such comparisons, however, will be limited, given the differences in the nations' culture, duration of existence, stage of development, economic stance and sense of social structure.Generally, nations with civil law traditions follow the deductive process, where judges apply only certain fixed (codified) legal rules without acknowledging previous decisions of other courts or tribunals.4 This process will sometimes lead to arbitrary results.Conversely, in common law nations, judges develop laws that establish continuity and enhance applicability to modem situations.These nations use the inductive approach.Here, judges decide cases by reasoning from prior decisions in order to isolate the general principle of law applicable to the present case.The major element in this process is stare decisis-the rule of judicial precedent.Thus, common law is sometimes referred to as judge-made law, and is used in most of the Commonwealth countries (former British colonies).' 1. See generally, J.H.