Reimagining Medical Law in Nigeria: A Jurisprudential Analysis of Health, Ethics, and Legal Practice

This chapter examined the evolving landscape of medical law in Nigeria through a jurisprudential and contextual lens. It discussed the conceptual foundations of medical law and traced its historical development within the Nigerian legal system, highlighting the intersection between law, ethics, and medical practice. The chapter explored key jurisprudential theories, including natural law, legal positivism, human rights theory, feminist legal theory, and African communitarian thought, and analyzed their relevance to contemporary medical practice in Nigeria. It analyzed how these theories manifested within Nigeria’s legal and regulatory framework governing healthcare, particularly in relation to consent to medical treatment, medical negligence, patient autonomy, reproductive health, and end-of-life decision-making. The chapter examined relevant constitutional provisions, statutes, regulatory mechanisms, and judicial decisions to assess the extent to which Nigerian medical law reflected or diverged from established theoretical traditions. It discovered that while Nigerian medical law demonstrated partial alignment with positivist and human rights-based approaches, it remained largely underdeveloped in integrating ethical considerations and indigenous socio-cultural realities into legal regulation and adjudication. The chapter further identified significant challenges, including weak enforcement of medical regulations, limited judicial engagement with medical jurisprudence, and tensions between individual autonomy and communal decision-making. The chapter concluded that reimagining medical law in Nigeria required a contextual and theory-informed approach capable of responding to the country’s unique socio-legal and healthcare realities and recommended, legislative reforms, stronger institutional oversight, enhanced ethical training for medical practitioners, and the adoption of a hybrid jurisprudential framework that harmonised foreign legal theories with indigenous Nigerian values.