By
OOREOLUWA. O AGBEDE*
Abstract
Discussions of the utility of the laws in Nigeria are not novel amongst scholars, lawyers, law students, and political scientists in Nigeria. Laws are generally agreed to serve multifarious purposes including goals parallel to medicine in man. The way Medicine has functions which vary from preventive, curative, and rehabilitative, so also can a law be to prevent, cure and rehabilitate a sick society. These different health care functions can be discussed with the curative function of law thus: What should be the course when the medicine is the cause of the sickness? or when the sickness is due to overdose of drugs, or drug abuse? The writer explains the illness of Nigeria from the perspective of the sociological jurisprudence, concluding that not just any law is sufficient as a medicine but a carefully prescribed law, the same way prescription has to be done by an expert for the drug to function maximally in the human body, noting that in reality, the law can either act to cure, prevent and rehabilitate the society of social ills or destroy, exacerbate and permit societal ills.