𝐎𝐩-𝐄𝐝: 𝐀 𝐅𝐥𝐚𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐌𝐫. 𝐄𝐝𝐢 𝐌.𝐎. 𝐅𝐚𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐁𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐚’𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐟 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞

Musa Bassadi Jawara
33 minutes ago
6 min read

This essay is a scholarly research I conducted. It is merit-based and reflects my personal philosophical argument on the standards required for the Office of Chief Justice in a post-autocratic Gambia. My hope is that legal scholars in this country do not feel bamboozled or intimidated by criticism. This is the moment to set the record right. Constitutional recovery demands open debate, evidence, and principle. This is my contribution to that debate.

Gambia’s incoming Chief Justice 𝐄𝐝𝐢 𝐌.𝐎. 𝐅𝐚𝐚𝐥

President Adama Barrow’s decision to appoint Mr. Edi M.O. Faal as The Gambia’s next Chief Justice was flawed. This nomination is not routine. It is a constitutional decision that will define whether The Gambia exits autocracy or merely rebrands it. Mr. Faal would replace the retiring Chief Justice Hassan B. Jallow.

The office of Chief Justice is the intellectual command center of a republic. The CJ does not just manage courts. He authors the jurisprudence that binds the executive, instructs Parliament, and teaches citizens the meaning of their rights. In post-autocratic states, that role is not ceremonial. It is existential.

To measure this appointment, we must begin with the standard set by the departing Chief Justice. Hassan B. Jallow did not arrive at the Supreme Court as a mere practitioner. He arrived as a scholar-jurist. His record is public, published, and peer-reviewed.

Jallow’s books, _Justice and the Law in The Gambia_ and _Journey for Justice_, are not memoirs. They are legal doctrine. They dissect the 1997 Constitution, diagnose the legal pathologies of Jammeh’s 22-year rule, and argue for judicial independence as the “last line of defense” in a recovering state. These texts are taught at the University of The Gambia. Future judges will cite them.

Internationally, Jallow authored jurisprudence. As Prosecutor of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, his indictments and memoranda helped define “command responsibility” and “genocidal intent” in international law. His articles in the _African Journal of International and Comparative Law_ confront how states rebuild law after systemic abuse. He did not just practice law. He developed it.

Crucially, Jallow was in the loop when The Gambia tried to write its way out of autocracy. The Constitutional Review Commission 2018-2020, chaired by Justice Cherno Sulayman Jallow, consulted the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and International IDEA. It produced a draft constitution after nationwide and diaspora consultations on 369 questions. CJ Jallow’s scholarly work on transitional justice made him the judiciary’s intellectual partner to that process.

That draft was submitted to President Barrow on 30 March 2020. It was gazetted 28 May and 28 August 2020. It was tabled 14 September 2020. It died on 22 September 2020, failing to secure a ¾ majority. The reason is public record: Schedule 4, Clause 4(1). The draft counted Barrow’s current term as his first of two. His allies demanded the clock reset. The CRC said Gambians demanded retroactivity. Parliament chose the incumbent over the people.

The cost was catastrophic. Two years of work. Nationwide tours. Diaspora consultations across the US, UK, EU, Saudi Arabia, and Africa. International experts. Legal drafting. Gazetting. The scale is comparable to other UN governance projects in The Gambia: $4.7 million for the TRRC, $2.2 million for 2021 election dialogue. We spent millions in money and national hope for a scholarly constitutional process. It was killed over one man’s term limits. We remain trapped in the 1997 Constitution — the document Jammeh battered for 22 years.

This is the constitutional emergency Mr. Edi M.O. Faal would inherit. The next Chief Justice will not get a blank slate. He will get a scarred constitution, a failed reform, and pending litigation on TRRC recommendations, Janneh Commission assets, and executive power. The Court will be asked to decide what “separation of powers” means after two decades of decrees. That is not a litigator’s job. It is a scholar’s.

Against that demand, Mr. Faal’s record is a void. He is a trial attorney based in California, admitted in three jurisdictions, with 44 years of litigation. He has served as counsel for The Gambia in cases before the _International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)_ — the World Bank’s arbitration body that resolves disputes between foreign investors and states. That includes _APCL Gambia B.V. v. Gambia_ ARB/17/40 and the West African Aquaculture annulment case. Those are facts. But ICSID briefs are client advocacy filed behind closed doors. They are not peer-reviewed scholarship, they create no constitutional doctrine, and they tell us nothing about how a man thinks the 1997 Constitution should govern after 22 years of executive abuse.

These are also facts: A comprehensive search of HeinOnline, Westlaw, SSRN, Google Scholar, WorldCat, _The Gambia Law Reports_, and major academic databases from 1982 to 2026 reveals no books, no law review articles, no peer-reviewed papers, and no published lectures on Gambian constitutional, criminal, or commercial law authored by Mr. Faal. 44 years in law, and not one published paragraph of legal philosophy for The Gambia to examine.

This is where Professor Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship becomes a verdict. In _Citizen and Subject_ and _Define and Rule_, Mamdani studies law after authoritarianism. His conclusion: “Post-autocratic states do not suffer from too little law. They suffer from too little _jurisprudence_. The lawyer who merely practices in the courts of the old regime cannot theorize the new. He reproduces the logic of the system he inhabited. The break requires a scholar-jurist — one who has written his way out of the old order before he can judge the new.”

Mamdani’s warning is The Gambia’s reality. For 22 years, law was an instrument of power. To rebuild, we need a Chief Justice who has already done the scholarly work of diagnosing that pathology. Jallow did. He wrote books about it. Mr. Faal has not written a sentence about it. Litigating hydrocarbon disputes in Washington is not preparation for defining presidential term limits in Banjul. It is, as Mamdani warns, a reproduction of external logics, not a construction of Gambian jurisprudence.

Lord Bingham, the great British jurist, wrote in _The Rule of Law_: “The judge who has never expressed a view in writing on the great questions of law comes to the bench untested. The public cannot know the mind that will govern them.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred: “A judge’s writings before the bench are the best evidence of judicial temperament.” The Gambia cannot be the global exception. We cannot gamble our constitutional recovery on a nominee whose legal philosophy is a blank page.

Chief Justice Jallow is leaving us a library. Mr. Faal would leave us an empty shelf. We spent millions on a constitutional process grounded in scholarship, only to see it killed for one man’s term limits. We cannot now appoint a Chief Justice who brings no scholarship at all to the fight that comes next. This nomination is not just unqualified. At this moment in our history, it is reckless. The Gambia deserves a scholar-jurist. The Constitution demands it.

The Chief Justice post cannot be a retirement stint, a golden handshake, or a political favor dressed in legal robes. This is the highest judicial office in the land — the one post that will rewrite Gambian law after 22 years of autocratic rule and shape jurisprudence for generations yet unborn. A trial attorney who spent his entire career steeped in U.S. jurisprudence cannot be rewarded with it simply because he once filed briefs for The Gambia. If Mr. Faal was a good trial attorney in the United States, that does not give him a license for such a delicate and important judiciary role.

Litigating in California is not training for deconstructing Jammeh’s legal legacy in Banjul. Winning contracts in Washington is not qualification for guarding the Constitution in Mile 2. The Supreme Court is not a place to learn Gambian law on the job. It is the place where Gambian law must be known, written, and defended before the gavel ever falls. For that reason, my rejection of Mr. Edi M.O. Faal as the next Chief Justice of the Republic of The Gambia is not partial, not conditional, not polite. It is total. The Gambia has buried too many constitutions. We will not bury another under the weight of an untested mind.

Musa Bassadi Jawara

Economist & Author

Bintou’s Point, Kerewan

Tuesday, July 7, 2026