Prof. Adeyemi, University of Lagos

The Problem#

• Professor Adeyemi researches how customary inheritance law in Nigeria interacts with the modern statutory framework
• Nigerian succession is extraordinarily complex: the north follows Islamic law (Sharia courts), the south follows a mix of customary law (varying by ethnic group — Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa customs are all different) and English-derived statutory law
• No standard format exists for representing customary inheritance rules alongside statutory ones
• Research requires structured data models to compare how different legal traditions distribute the same estate — but everything is currently trapped in narrative prose and court judgments
• Thousands of succession disputes pass through customary courts each year with no comparable data

How They’d Use INHERIT#

• Adeyemi uses the africa-customary extension to model Nigerian customary succession rules, with customarySystem identifying the specific ethnic tradition, communalPropertyRights distinguishing communal from individual ownership, and elderCouncilRole capturing the role of community elders in estate disputes
• person.json entries carry clanOrLineage for ethnic group identification
• Adeyemi creates worked examples: the same family estate distributed under Yoruba customary law (eldest son inherits the family compound), Igbo customary law (all sons share equally, daughters excluded), Islamic law (faraid fractions via the islamic-succession extension), and the Administration of Estates Law (English-derived statutory rules)
• Each example is a complete INHERIT document with the appropriate extension activated, making the differences machine-comparable
• The CITATION.cff file in the INHERIT repository provides the citation metadata Adeyemi needs for academic publications

The Integration#

• Adeyemi does not build integrations — she creates INHERIT documents as research data
• She publishes them alongside her papers and invites other researchers to extend the africa-customary extension with additional ethnic customary law models
• The open standard means her research data is reusable by other academics, courts, and policy-makers

The Business Case#

• There is no commercial business case — the value is academic and policy-oriented
• Nigeria has a population of 230 million, with thousands of succession disputes in customary courts each year
• A structured data model for customary inheritance — comparable across ethnic traditions and against statutory law — could inform judicial reform, legal education, and access to justice
• Families who currently navigate the system without professional help would benefit from structured, comparable precedents

Before / After#

Without INHERIT:

1. Prof. Adeyemi researches Yoruba succession customs by reading court judgments and ethnographic texts
2. She writes a narrative comparison of Yoruba vs Igbo vs statutory inheritance — 40 pages of prose
3. Another researcher in Abuja wants to extend her work to Hausa customs — but the data is locked in a PDF, not machine-readable
4. A customary court judge in Lagos has no structured way to compare the precedents
5. The research remains in academic journals, inaccessible to the families it could help

With INHERIT:

1. Prof. Adeyemi creates four INHERIT documents: the same estate distributed under Yoruba, Igbo, Islamic, and statutory rules
2. Each document uses the africa-customary or islamic-succession extension — the differences are machine-comparable
3. The researcher in Abuja downloads her data, adds Hausa customary rules as a new extension variant, and publishes the enriched dataset
4. A customary court judge queries the structured data to find comparable distributions