Taslim Olawale Elias
Nigerian judge (1914–1991)
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.
While working at the Nigerian Railway, Elias became an external student of the University of London, and later he passed the intermediate examinations for the BA and LLB degrees. He left Nigeria for the United Kingdom in 1944 and was admitted to University College London. As this was during World War II, with London the target of frequent bomb attacks, he spent some time at Cambridge's Trinity College.
“Taslim Olawale Elias” enters the record as nigerian judge (1914–1991). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Taslim, Olawale and Elias can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Taslim Olawale Elias” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.