WHY BARRISTER" CANNOT STAND BEFORE A LAWYER'S NAME - COPIED

 

A Description, Not a Title

Why “Barrister” Cannot Stand Before a Lawyer’s Name.

By Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)

I. The Memorandum and the Storm

On 13 July 2026, the Chief Registrar of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, Mr. Kabir E. Akanbi, issued a memorandum under the title “Prohibition of the Use of the Title ‘Barrister’ as a Prefix to Names.”

 He did so, on the face of the document, at the direction of the Honourable the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun. Within days of its circulation the memorandum had provoked a storm of commentary, much of it critical, some of it derisive, and a good deal of it uninformed. Voices have been raised to say that the Chief Justice should never have descended into so contentious a matter; that the directive is elitist; that it is an assault on a harmless custom of the Nigerian Bar.

I take the opposite view, and I take it without hesitation. The memorandum is right in substance, modest in scope, and issued by precisely the authority best placed to issue it. If it has ignited a national conversation about a habit the profession should have retired long ago, that is a public service, not a misstep.

 In this piece I propose to do four things: first, to analyse what the memorandum actually says, what it does, and to whom it is directed; secondly, to demonstrate, from the history of the word, from the Nigerian statute, and from the practice of every serious common law jurisdiction, that “Barrister” is a description of professional status and not a title of honour, and that its use as a prefix to a name is wrong; thirdly, to audit the authorities now circulating in the commentaries, because some of them are sound, some are misdescribed, and some, I regret to say, appear not to exist at all; and fourthly, to state the acceptable ways in which the word may properly be used.

II. What the Memorandum Says, and to Whom It Is Directed

The memorandum is addressed to “All Litigation Staff, Legal Practitioners, Court Registrars, and Lawyers.” One notes, in passing, the tautology: “legal practitioners” and “lawyers” are one and the same persons in Nigerian law, so the address list says the same thing twice. 

But the meaning is plain enough. The document speaks to two audiences at once: internally, to the officers and registry staff of the Supreme Court itself; and externally, to the legal practitioners who transact official business with that Court.

The operative text is in two movements. The first is declaratory. The Chief Registrar states that he is directed by the Chief Justice to notify the addressees “that the use of the title ‘Barrister’ as a prefix to names is inappropriate and inconsistent with the standards of professionalism expected within the Supreme Court of Nigeria.” 

The second is mandatory. All officers concerned “are hereby directed to discontinue the use of the title ‘Barrister’ before their names in all official correspondence, records, documents, identity materials, and any other official engagements with immediate effect.”

 A third paragraph supplies the machinery of enforcement: heads of departments and unit heads are to ensure strict compliance by officers under their supervision.

Three features of this drafting deserve emphasis. First, the anchor is professionalism “within the Supreme Court of Nigeria.” The directive is territorially and institutionally moored to the apex court, its records, and its official engagements. 

Secondly, the repeated qualifier is “official“: official correspondence, official records, official engagements. The memorandum says nothing about how lawyers greet one another at a wedding in Warri. Thirdly, the enforcement mechanism is administrative and supervisory, the ordinary machinery by which a court manages its own house, and not penal.

III. What the Memorandum Does, and What It Does Not Do

In juridical character, the memorandum is an administrative or practice direction. It rests on the superintendence which the Chief Justice exercises over the Supreme Court and its registry. It creates no offence. It prescribes no punishment. It does not, and could not, amend the Legal Practitioners Act (LPA) or the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners (RPC). It does not reach social usage, private speech, or the informal courtesies of the Bar.

 The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), through its National Publicity Secretary, Bridget Ijeoma Edokwe, Esq., has issued a notice simply advising members to take due note of the directive in official engagements and correspondence. Commentators, including Dr. Monday Ubani, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), have correctly stressed the same limits: the directive governs official records and dealings with the Court; it criminalises nothing and does not police what Nigerians call their lawyers in conversation.

But those who dwell only on the memorandum’s limits miss its significance, which lies in its provenance. Under the LPA, the roll of legal practitioners is maintained at the Supreme Court, and the Chief Registrar of that Court is its custodian. The rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria is conferred by the Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee over which the Chief Justice presides. 

In other words, the office that keeps the register of our names, and the office that confers the only rank our statute knows, have together told the profession how names should appear in the records of the highest court in the land. That is not an intrusion. That is the system working exactly as it should. And there is a quiet elegance in the fact that the Chief Registrar signed the memorandum “Kabir E. Akanbi, Esq.“: the correct form, demonstrating itself at the foot of the very document.

IV. The Word and Its History

The word “barrister” is not a title. It never was. It derives from the bar, the physical barrier in the halls of the Inns of Court in London, Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple, to which a student, having kept his terms and satisfied the Benchers, was “called.” The person so called became an utter barrister, a member of a class of practitioners entitled to plead.

 The word therefore describes what a person is, a member of a branch of the legal profession, and not who he is.

English usage has always reflected this. The words that stand before a name in the English tradition are honorifics of the person (Mr, Mrs, Ms), of office (Justice, Professor), of degree (Dr), or of conferred rank and nobility. Descriptions of occupation and qualification follow the name. 

Hence the venerable forms which older members of our profession will remember from the law lists and from chambers doors: “John Smith, of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law“; “of Gray’s Inn, Barrister“; “of the Inner Temple, Barrister.” The description came after the name, as a statement of fact, precisely because it was a statement of fact and not a decoration. No Englishman, in five centuries of the profession, has ever written “Barrister John Smith.”

I do not speak of these forms from hearsay. In my library are books handed down to me by my late father, the Honourable Justice Franklin Oritse-mueyiwa (F. O. M.) Atake, in which he describes himself, in the manner of his generation, as “F. O. M. Atake, of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister at Law.” Some of those volumes date back to the early 1950s, before I was born. The name first; the Inn next; the description last.

That was how the men who brought this profession home to Nigeria understood the word, because that was how the profession itself understood it, and nothing in the intervening three quarters of a century has altered its grammar.

Nigeria has developed a social fashion of occupational prefixes: Engr., Arc., Pharm., and, among lawyers, the ubiquitous “Barr.” Whatever other callings choose to do under their own statutes and councils is their affair. For the law, the fashion has no foundation whatsoever, and, as I show below, it has been expressly condemned by the profession’s own disciplinary tribunal.

V. The Nigerian Statute Knows No Such Title

The Legal Practitioners Act is the charter of our profession, and it is fatal to the prefix. Section 4 provides for the call to the Bar by the Body of Benchers. Section 2(1) provides that a person shall be entitled to practice as a barrister and solicitor if, and only if, his name is on the roll. 

Section 24 defines a “legal practitioner” as a person entitled, in accordance with the Act, to practise as a barrister or as a barrister and solicitor, whether generally or for the purposes of a particular office or proceedings. Observe the language. These are words of entitlement, capacity and description. Nowhere does the Act confer a title, style or honorific on the persons it qualifies.

 The one exception proves the rule: the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, created by section 5 and conferred by the Privileges Committee, and that rank, significantly, is worn after the name, never before it.

Every Nigerian lawyer is enrolled as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Ours is a fused profession; each of us is both things at once. The prefix habit takes half of that description, the half its user thinks glamorous, and parades it before the name, while quietly suppressing the solicitor half of what its user actually is. 

If description were truly the aim, the lawyer would be obliged to write “Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria Stephen Blogs,” and the absurdity of the full form exposes the vanity of the abbreviated one. “Barrister Stephen Blogs” is not a description. It is an ornament, and an inaccurate one.

Section 22(1) of the Act completes the picture. It makes it an offence for any person other than a legal practitioner to practice or hold himself out to practice as one, to take or use the title of legal practitioner, or wilfully to take or use “any name, title, addition or description falsely implying” that he is qualified. 

The statute, in other words, treats these words as protected descriptions and guards them against impostors. It confers no prefix on the qualified. A protected description is a shield against the unqualified; it was never intended as a plume for the qualified.

The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court itself supplies the doctrinal anchor. In Okafor v. Nweke (2007) 10 NWLR (Pt. 1043) 521, the Court, construing sections 2(1) and 24 of the Act, held that court processes signed in the name of a law firm, “J.H.C. Okolo SAN & Co,” were incompetent, because only a person whose name is on the roll may sign them. 

The principle was reaffirmed in SLB Consortium Ltd v. Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (2011) 9 NWLR (Pt. 1252) 317. The teaching of that line of authority is simple and profound: the law knows a lawyer by the name on the roll, and by nothing else.

 No name on the roll begins with “Barrister.” When the Chief Justice directs that the prefix disappear from the official records of the Supreme Court, she is doing no more than aligning the Court’s records with the only identity the law recognises.

VI. The Profession’s Own Tribunal Has Already Spoken

The commentaries on the present memorandum have leaned heavily on one authority, and it deserves careful handling: Nigerian Bar Association v. Ofomata, reported in (2017) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1557) 128 at 133. Let me first state its true provenance, because it is being misdescribed online. 

It is not, as some widely shared articles assert, a judgment of the Supreme Court. It is a direction of the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC), the statutory tribunal of the profession established under section 11 of the LPA, reported in the Nigerian Weekly Law Reports (NWLR).

 In that matter, the processes before the Committee had described a legal practitioner as “Barrister Ikenna C. Ofoma.” The Committee stated that “the appellation of ‘Barrister’ as a title before the name of a legal practitioner is unprofessional and improper,” and it proceeded to strike the prefix from each of the three counts, substituting “Esq.”

When the ruling was reported in 2017 it provoked a memorable exchange between Mr. Sylvester Udemezue, then a lecturer at the Nigerian Law School, who defended it as binding on all practitioners by virtue of section 12 of the LPA, and Mr. Bolaji Ramos, who dismissed the relevant passage as obiter dictum.

 In fairness, the observation was made in passing rather than as the ratio of a disciplinary charge about titles, and its weight must be assessed accordingly. But I would say this. Even taken at its lowest, an observation of the profession’s own disciplinary tribunal, acted upon there and then by striking the offending prefix from the record and replacing it with the correct form, and, so far as I am aware, contradicted by no court in the nine years since, is a weathervane that no careful practitioner should ignore. 

And the Committee’s choice of substitute, “Esq.,” tells us exactly what proper form looks like. I should add, in the spirit of the exactitude I am urging, that I have relied on the passage as it was reproduced, identically, by both protagonists of the 2017 exchange, each of whom engaged with the report; readers minded to deploy the authority should nonetheless consult the certified report at (2017) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1557) 128 for themselves.

VII. The View from Abroad

The critics say the directive is an affectation. Let us then look at the jurisdictions from which the word came, and to which our profession traces its forms.

In England and Wales, the very use of the word is regulated. The Bar Standards Board (BSB) controls who may hold himself out as a barrister in connection with the supply of legal services, and its published guidance restricts even persons called to the Bar but without practicing certificates from using the title in that context.

 Practising barristers describe themselves after their names, or simply as counsel; those appointed to silk take the postnominal letters KC, for King’s Counsel, after the name. The country that invented the barrister has never once placed the word before anybody’s name.

In Canada, the profession is fused, as ours is.

 Every lawyer admitted in the common law provinces becomes a barrister and solicitor, and the compound description “Barrister & Solicitor” customarily appears after the lawyer’s name on letterheads and office signage, as a statement of qualification. 

The Dictionary of Canadianisms records precisely this usage: the phrase references the qualification to practise. It follows the name. It does not precede it.

In Australia, the position is the same. The professional description follows the name, and even elevated rank is worn after it: rule 9 of the Legal Profession Uniform General Rules 2015 prescribes who is entitled to use the post nominal style of Senior Counsel (SC).

 Where, then, does the prefix flourish? Principally in parts of South Asia, where “Barrister” survives as a colonial honorific attached to those called to the English Bar. That, and not the tradition of the profession’s home, is the company the Nigerian habit keeps: a vestige of empire misread as a mark of rank.

VIII. An Audit of the Authorities Now in Circulation

Because this debate is being conducted at speed on social media, it is being conducted, in places, with citations that will not withstand scrutiny, and I consider it a duty to say so plainly. 

The following, in my assessment, are sound: NBA v. Ofomata (2017) 5 NWLR (Pt. 1557) 128, subject to the provenance I have explained (an LPDC direction, not a Supreme Court judgment); Okafor v. Nweke (2007) 10 NWLR (Pt. 1043) 521; and SLB Consortium Ltd v. NNPC (2011) 9 NWLR (Pt. 1252) 317, both genuine decisions of the Supreme Court on the enrolled name.

The following, which are circulating in some widely shared articles, I have been unable to verify and readers should treat with the greatest caution until someone produces the primary record. First, a purported resolution of the NBA National Executive Committee at Port Harcourt in November 2015, declaring the prefix contrary to professional ethics: it may exist, but I have found no contemporaneous record of it. 

Secondly, a purported disciplinary matter styled “LPDC v. Chief Ladi Rotimi-Williams (2019)“: I can find no trace of any such reported matter, and the very style of the citation is irregular. 

Thirdly, a case cited as “Chief Gani Fawehinmi v. NBA (2008) 6 NWLR (Pt. 1084) 478,” said to concern the regulation of modes of address: the celebrated Fawehinmi v. NBA litigation belongs to the late 1980s and had nothing to do with titles, and I can find no 2008 report answering this description.

 Fourthly, a florid sentence attributed to Ofomata to the effect that the title smacks of aggrandizement of self: it appears in no version of the passage reproduced by those who actually engaged with the report. Some of this material bears the hallmarks of machine generated confabulation dressed in the costume of law reporting. 

There is a rich irony in it: a debate about professional exactitude is being prosecuted, in some quarters, with inexact and invented citations. The discipline is the same one I urge on the prefix itself: verify the report before you deploy the citation.

IX. The Acceptable Ways in Which the Word May Be Used

Nothing in the memorandum, and nothing in this article, banishes the word “barrister” from our professional life. It has honourable uses, all of them after the name or as a plain description.

 A lawyer may correctly render himself “Stephen Blogs, Esq.“; or “Stephen Blogs, Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria,” the full and accurate form of our enrolment; or “Stephen Blogs, Barrister at Law,” in the old style, after the name; or “Stephen Blogs, Legal Practitioner,” the language of the statute itself. 

Those on whom the rank has been conferred write “Stephen Blogs, SAN.” The ordinary honorifics remain available before the name: Mr, Mrs, Ms; Dr, where the degree has been earned; Professor, where the chair is held; Chief, where the stool has conferred it. In court, a lawyer is “counsel,” “learned counsel,” or “of counsel.” 

A firm’s notepaper may accurately describe its members as barristers and solicitors. And the spoken courtesy of the Bar, “Good morning, Barrister,” is a social pleasantry, not a written style, and the memorandum does not touch it.

 What is wrong, and what has always been wrong, is the written prefix: “Barrister Stephen Blogs,” or its diminutive cousin, “Barr. Stephen Blogs,” a form unknown to the statute, unknown to the roll, unknown to the Inns from which the word came, and condemned by the disciplinary tribunal of our own profession.

X. The Wider Malady: “Dr” Without a Doctorate and “Professor” Without a Chair

The prefix disease of which “Barrister” is the most visible symptom does not end with that word, and since this article is about the honesty of names, let me make heavy weather of two related abuses now spreading through the profession. 

The first is the unearned “Dr.” A doctorate is a degree: it is researched over years, written under supervision, and defended before examiners, and the letters exist to record that ordeal and nothing else.

Yet one now encounters lawyers who write “Dr” before their names without having earned any such degree from any university, and others who deploy an honorary award, conferred for occasion or philanthropy rather than examined scholarship, as though it were the real thing, contrary to the better convention that an honorary degree is acknowledged, if at all, after the name with the words honoris causa, and is never worn as a title. 

Those who have genuinely earned the degree know precisely what the letters cost, and it is an affront to them, and to the universities that examined them, for the same letters to be assumed by others at no cost at all. Every unearned “Dr” devalues every earned one.

The second abuse is graver, because it counterfeits not a degree but an office.

 A professor is the holder of a chair: an appointment made by a proper university, carried with duties of teaching and scholarship, and conferred through the institution’s own rigorous processes. Yet the Bar now teems with “Professors” who hold no substantive chair anywhere: practitioners whose entire connection to the academy is a visiting appointment, an adjunct engagement, or a courtesy extended by institutions of uncertain pedigree.

 Let it be said plainly: a visiting professorship is an act of hospitality, not a conferment of rank. The courtesy of the host institution runs for the currency of the visit and within its walls; it is not a licence to carry the title through life, onto the letterhead, and into the law reports. The lawyer who does so is not describing himself; he is promoting himself, and doing it in borrowed plumage. 

And the habit, I regret to observe, is getting worse, not better: each year the prefixes multiply and lengthen, until the profession stands in danger of valuing the decoration of a name above the learning behind it. 

That, I suggest, is the deeper service of the Chief Justice’s memorandum. It addresses, in terms, only one prefix in one set of records; but its spirit addresses the entire culture of title inflation, and it deserves the profession’s support precisely because it is an attempt to nip that culture in the bud before it becomes our defining trait.

XI. Answering the Critics

It remains to answer those who say the Chief Justice should not have spoken because the subject has become controversial. With respect, that argument inverts the office. Controversy is a measure of attention, not of error.

 

The head of the judiciary, in whose court the roll of our names is kept, is precisely the authority to prescribe how names shall appear in that court’s records, and the modesty of the directive, confined as it is to official engagements, is the complete answer to the charge of overreach.

One objection now circulating online must be met directly, because it rests upon a complete misconception of the memorandum. The commentator recalls that, in his youth, the celebrated Chief J. A. Cole lived just a street away, and that beside the gate of the great man’s residence, his home and not his chambers, stood the inscription “J. A. Cole, Barrister at Law.”

 He recalls, further, that when his set was called to the Bar in 1983 it was common to find solo practitioners describing themselves on their letterheads in the form “Yomi Afolabi Oloja, Barrister, Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria.” The Supreme Court, he observes, did not complain in those days, and he asks, with an air of triumph, what has changed. The answer is: nothing, and that is precisely the point.

 Every example the commentator offers is a description placed after the name, which is the very form the memorandum leaves untouched and the very form this article commends. Chief J. A. Cole, a senior lawyer of his day, addressed himself properly, and the inscription at his gate is a witness for the directive, not against it. 

The Supreme Court did not complain then because there was nothing to complain of, and it complains of nothing in those forms now, for the memorandum is confined to the prefix and to the apex court’s official records. To deploy Chief Cole’s correct usage as a stick with which to beat a directive that condemns only the incorrect usage is to read into the memorandum a prohibition that is simply not there, and to criticise the Chief Justice for words she never wrote. 

That is not argument; it is pure mischief making, and readers should not allow themselves to be misled by it.

Nor am I moved by the plea that the prefix is a harmless custom. Customs that misdescribe are not harmless in a profession whose entire craft is precision of language. We are the calling that strikes out a misplaced comma in an affidavit and impeaches a witness on the difference between “shall” and “may.” 

A Bar that polices the exactness of everyone else’s words cannot claim a dispensation for the inexactness of its own. If the directive has, as I believe, sparked a long overdue reckoning with a habit born of misunderstanding, then far from criticising the Chief Justice, the profession owes her its thanks.

XII. Conclusion

The word “barrister” earned its dignity at the bar of the Inns of Court, and it carries that dignity still, in its proper place. Its proper place is after the name, where Lincoln’s Inn put it, where our enrolment puts it, where England, Canada and Australia have always kept it, and where the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee restored it when it struck the prefix out and wrote “Esq.” in its stead. 

The Supreme Court’s memorandum of 13 July 2026 does no violence to the profession. It simply asks the profession to describe itself accurately in the records of its own apex court. There is no such person as Barrister Stephen Blogs. There never was. There is only Stephen Blogs, Esq., Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, and that, properly understood, is title enough for any lawyer.