Book Review Symposia

Since the 1960s, land reform has been a key topic in Africa. Many land policies have been formulated and related programmes have been implemented - all in the name of improving agricultural investment and therefore, productivity, as well as bringing about general social and economic development. By doing so, many land policies and land reform interventions worked to do away with African landholding systems which were dubbed "static, rigid, insular, inflexible, incompatible, and insecure" due to the absence of clearly defined and enforceable property rights. It is these perceived weaknesses 'inherent' in African landholding system that prompted the need for land reform. Pauline E. Peters and many others have widely criticised these conventional premises of land policies and land reform interventions in Africa - and so she continues in the chapter The Significance of Descent- Based 'Customary' Land Management for Land Reform and Agricultural Futures in Africa of the edited volume Rethinking Land Reform in Africa: New Ideas, Opportunities and Challenges.

Developing a policy framework with a view to improving the governance of land within the continent must prioritize tenure reform by recognizing and mainstreaming communal/indigenous/customary land rights. This departure from the initial obtaining policy approach that focused on titling and conversion of customary to modern tenure is critical for sustainable land reform in Africa as argued by Lorenzo Cotulla and Clarke. Rethinking land reform in Africa new ideas, opportunities and challenges assesses the progress that has been made in land policy reform in the continent within the decade that the Framework and Guidelines have been in place. It also explores opportunities and challenges as well as new frontiers in the land reform discourse. Importantly, one of the themes explored in the book is communal land tenure.

By highlighting the governance practices that enabled India and Brazil to circumvent and minimize the oppressive TRIPS regime, Vanni offers a critical perspective with key implications for scholarly work on the politics of intellectual property in marginalized contexts. Her emphasis on local approaches to law-making is certainly instructive for the interdisciplinary literature on intellectual property that tends to focus on foreign appropriation of traditional knowledge and illegal efforts such as piracy and counterfeit production to subvert the international regime.

Amaka Vanni already proffered answers to the foregoing nagging questions, and more, albeit within the broad conversation around pharmaceutical patent and access to essential medicines and health technology in the Global South. She undertook this task in her well-researched and exceptionally captivating monograph: Patent Games in the Global South: Pharmaceutical Patent Law Making in Brazil, India and Nigeria (Hart Publishing 2020). In the book, structured into 7 strong chapters, she critically unpacks, engages and beautifully links the role of states and non-states actors in international patent law-making with the realities of patent legislation and policy formulation, as well as pharmaceutical innovation and R&D in Brazil, India and Nigeria. 

This chapter, like much of the book, is exceptionally well researched, and brings seemingly unconnected developments neatly within the overarching narrative mentioned above. The author’s focus on how international law affects the ‘mundane’ everyday life, and vice versa, allows (or perhaps requires) her to examine much more than just the oft over-discussed ‘hot topics’ (i.e., compulsory licenses and patentability criteria) of the Indian pharma-patent landscape.

A central point highlighted in Vanni's analysis comes in the title of the chapter itself, “the Juridical State”. Brazil's social and political conflicts are for the most part moderated, and often even defined, by the role of courts. Hence, this centrality of the Judiciary in legal-political disputes is an unavoidable aspect of the analysis (and particularly as this was perhaps not always the case in the country's history). In IP and health policy, the influence of the Judiciary is crucial, where certain courts may take decisions on the validity of pharmaceutical patents - directly affecting conditions of competition and access to medicines - and superior courts may decide upon the constitutionality of aspects of laws and regulations that may either legitimize or fully impede the implementation of public health policies in IP matters.

In light of the current global health crisis caused by COVID-19 pandemic and the attendant discussions on the importance of pharmaceutical patents to our daily existence, the analyses in this book (and the symposium) performs an important function in documenting the role of different sets of actors and their influences on the domestic implementation of global patent rules, access to medicines, and how these (in)actions led us to where we are today.

This book is without doubt, one of the most impactful legal textbooks in Nigeria in at least twenty five years. It is a refreshing addition to the legal libraries across Nigeria and beyond. Judges at all levels of courts in Nigeria, legal practitioners, arbitrators and lawmakers alike as well as law teachers, researchers and students, will find Private International Law in Nigeria a highly resourceful and practical guide that fills an intellectual void in a long neglected but increasingly critical field of law. It is a long overdue contribution to the field of private international law in particular, and to legal scholarship in Nigeria as a whole.

Judicial authority, such as Alfred C Toepfer Inc v Edokpolor (1965) NCLR 89, establish that a creditor of a foreign judgment may bring an action at common law in Nigeria, by which action he/she, in effect, seeks recognition and/or “enforcement” of that foreign judgment. The common law action has not been abolished by statute or disapproved judicially but, sadly, it is not widely understood or used by practitioners/courts in Nigeria. This is unfortunate, especially where the statutory mechanism for the enforcement of foreign judgments is certainly limited but otherwise shrouded in confusion. This paper argues for a reawakening of the common law action.

This work assumes a benchmark position naturally when it comes to insightful discussion on energy access challenges in SSA. The readers will not only enjoy the reading but also aggregate value to their vision on the pivotal role of the regionalism as a tool through which SSA countries may gradually invert the status quo of energy access challenges.