A university don, Dr Akin Oluwadayisi, has called for adequate compensation for judges upon retirement in recognition of their labour in writing judgments. He recommended that a tax be imposed on legal publishers of case reports as a source of funding.
Dr Oluwadayisi, a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law at Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, Ondo State, made the call while delivering a paper at the All Universities’ Law Librarians Workshop/Conference, organised by the Council of Legal Education at the Nigerian Law School, Abuja, on Wednesday, July 20, 2025.
According to him, although court judgments are for public consumption and can be published under the doctrine of “fair use,” the economic and labour theories of intellectual property rights suggest that this principle should be applied more equitably.
He argued that private firms that publish law reports often benefit financially from the venture without adequately compensating the judges who authored the judgments.
Dr Oluwadayisi drew attention to the considerable labour and effort that goes into writing judgments, sometimes spanning thousands of pages. He noted that private firms often “repackage” these judgments and profit from them without contributing to the welfare of the judges.
He recommended that such companies be required to contribute a percentage of their profits from legal publishing to a fund that would support the welfare of retired judges and the judiciary at large. He suggested a contribution rate of 3–5% of profits, similar to the model used by companies contributing to the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) in Nigeria.
Dr Oluwadayisi also expressed concerns about the impact of electronic law report publishing on legal research, particularly for undergraduate long essays, master’s dissertations, and PhD theses that are subjected to plagiarism checks such as Turnitin.
He lamented that judgments written by judges, who are public officers, are increasingly being treated as the “copyright” of electronic law publishers rather than that of the court, especially when legal writings are made to pass through plagiarism detection software.
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