Does the Nigerian judicial system have a culture of lengthy judgments and rulings? Is this a cog in the wheel of speedy justice delivery? Lawyers examined these issues at the recent public presentation of the second edition of Babalola’s Law Dictionary of Judicially Defined Words and Phrases in Lagos. ROBERT EGBE reports
‘’They are sometimes valuable, but often they are what I have called vanity judgments. Such judgments, of which virtually every appellate judge, not least myself, has been guilty, are at best a waste of time and space, and, at worst, confusion and uncertainty.”
These were the words of Lord David Neuberger, president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2017 while speaking in November 2016, on the need to reduce the length of Supreme Court’s judgments.
Like Lord Neuberger observed, excessively lengthy judgments can be counterproductive, not just for judges, but also for lawyers, litigants, students and other members of the public who may need to read them.
The appropriate length of judgments was the theme of the public presentation of the second edition of Babalola’s Law Dictionary of Judicially Defined Words and Phrases.
Chief Judge of Oyo State, Justice Muktar Abimbola, who was represented by Justice Iyabo Yerima; Senior Advocates of Nigeria, including Mr. Uche Obi, Mr. Seyi Sowemimo, Mr. Adeyinka Olumide-Fusika and Prof. Konyinsola Ajayi, who was represented by his junior, Mr. Olaniyi Osotuyi, were some of the guests at the event.
Others included the Chairman, Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Lagos branch, Mr. Yemi Akangbe; and the Director, Lagos State Office of the Public Defender, Mrs. Yinka Adeyemi, who represented the Lagos State Solicitor-General.
Babalola’s Law Dictionary’s editor, Mr. Olumide Babalola, said it was important to review the relevance of lengthy judgments by the courts in the face of overwhelming court dockets.
He observed that judgments usually become lengthy when judges include arguments of counsels before giving their own decisions.
This practice, he noted, sometimes create confusion, with some lawyers wrongly taking arguments of counsel as the decision of the judge.
Like Babalola, foreign judges are concerned about lengthy judgments with difficult terminologies.
In 2016, an English High Court Judge Mr Justice Peter Jackson delivered a judgment that was hailed as an exemplary instance of plain English.
Sir Jackson went to previously unheard-of lengths to make a judgment in a family court case comprehensible even for the children it affects – by replacing dry terminology with several down-to-earth phrases and even a smiley face symbol.
The ruling, which was, published online, is thought to be the first in English legal history to incorporate an emoji, or web symbol, to explain a point of evidence.
Babalola said: “Some judgments have close to 100 pages; and from page one to 99, what you will see are arguments of counsel. The remaining one page is actually the decision of the court.
“It happened in court one time, when a counsel cited an argument of counsel as the decision of the court and it is very easy to get lost in that when you are reading the entire judgment.
“I got a judgment in 2017; it was just five pages and a lawyer called me and said, ‘Are you sure this is the court judgment?’ and I said yes.
“The lawyer was surprised because what we are used to is having lengthy judgments. So, when we don’t have lengthy judgments, we disparage the judge as rather lazy. I keep reading old decisions of the Supreme Court; some of them, three pages, some five pages, 1976, 1980s decisions of the Supreme Court and they captured the point.
“So, if that could be done in the past when they didn’t have this number of cases, I think it calls for deliberation and recommendation, for the judiciary to see whether we still need to continue to have lengthy decisions.”
Obi, who delivered the keynote address, shared Babalola’s view.
He said, “Unduly lengthy and wordy judgments are, in the considered view of this speaker, elitist and many a times incomprehensible.
“We should shed the customary thinking that core issues for determination in every dispute cannot be sufficiently addressed unless a ‘treatise’ has been written. Observing brevity in judgment writing, in a constructive and pragmatic manner, will usually be adequate in distilling the relevant issues for determination.”
But not everyone agreed that shorter judgments are more desirable, effective or practicable than lengthy ones.
Justice Yerima noted that it might be impracticable, in some cases, to deliver short judgments.
“I have judgments that even after I have reread and done all the editing, still end up being 74 pages, 80 pages, and what I do when I’m delivering is that I just – there’s another instruction that you must read word for word, every judgment, everything, we should read it word for word.
“So, when I want to read a judgment that I know is about 70 plus pages, for instance, I tell the counsel that ‘The judgment is ready (because I print it out), the first 15 pages are the evaluation of the evidence, you know what you said, you know what you said. Do you still want me to read it? It is 15 pages.
“If they say ‘My lord, we can dispense with that’, then I go into the body of the judgment. So, that’s the picture. You have to show your understanding, evaluate all the issues and evaluating alone can take 15-20 pages, even in criminal matters.
“A ruling I delivered two or three weeks ago on no-case submission: six accused persons, the least count was about four for each person, out of about nine counts. They brought their written addresses for their no-case submissions.
“To show understanding of the no-case submission of each of the counts, you have to take each of the counts. Has the prosecution proved its case to warrant the defendant to enter his defence? Now you do four, five counts for six accused persons. Now, how can that be short? Because, if you make it short, they’ll say ‘Oh, she has no understanding of what it entails.’ So, I think every case should be decided on its merit.”
Sowemimo suggested that lengthy judgments are neither a particularly immediate problem nor a cause of justice delay. He observed that trial delay is a more pressing concern.
He said: “The topic seems to suggest that lengthy judgments are our problem and we need to dispense with them. But I seem to take a different view that the judgment themselves are not the problem, they form a very insignificant part of the trial process.
“You have cases in our court that are five years old, 15 years old, 20 years old and they have not reached the judgment stage. It is not the judgment itself that gives us the problem because even the Constitution says you have to deliver it within three months.”
He suggested that the main issue is how to create a system that allows judges to deal with cases within one or two years.
Sowemimo said: “Mr. Val Obi highlighted a number of the problems we have which result in delay in trial of cases, a lot of it on the part of lawyers, adjournments and frivolous appeals.
“I’m yet to see a trial process in Nigeria where documents are tendered without some objection or the other, even when they have been front-loaded. That is what takes a lot of our time.
“So, I think, well, we should be concerned about the length these judgments, but that really depends on the style of each judge and, where a judge has to deal with recondite points of law, he may need to write very lengthy judgments. We only ask that it should be sound.”
He went on: “But I believe that it is not the judgments that are our problem, we need not dispense with lengthy judgments, we should rather address those other issues which delay the trial of cases especially on the part of lawyers, adjournments and sometimes also on the part of judges, because we realize that after we have come from a long vacation, the next thing you hear is that they’re having judges’ conference and the next day, there are other things.
“So, before you even have the first three months of the legal year, you fimd that you’re already in Christmas period, so these are the things which delay. There has to be attitudinal changes.”
For Mrs. Adeyemi, the length of a judgment depends on the case.
She said: “It will depend on the case before a court. If it is a case that the issues have been determined, it is expected that when the judgement comes, it’s going to be very short. But where it involves long facts and all that, just like my lord has said here, it will involve the judge to take into consideration all the issues there.”
Mrs. Adeyemi also observed that beyond judgment length, “the trend all over the world is that court proceedings should be made available to the public.
“If that is so, it has even gone to the level of human rights issue that everybody must have access to court proceedings and, if that is so, it is believed that court judgments should be made so simple so that people who have access to the judgment will be able to make use of it like the media and the litigants themselves.
“But, most importantly, the content of that judgment is what matters, the verbosity that everybody has been talking about should be removed, it (the judgment) should be understandable to anybody taking it, reading it and making use of it.
“We must also have in mind that these judgments serve as precedence even for lawyers, so everybody must be able to access it and able to understand what the court had written.”