Taslim Olawale Elias (11 November 1914 – 14 August 1991) was a Nigerian jurist who served as minister of Justice and attorney-general of Nigeria from 1960 to 1966, Chief Justice of Nigeria from 1972 to 1975 and president of the International Court of Justice from 1982 to 1985. He was a scholar who modernised and extensively revised the laws of Nigeria. Youth and studies Elias was born into the traditional aristocracy of Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, on 11 November 1914. He received his secondary education at the Church Missionary Society Grammar School and Igbobi College in Lagos. He married Ganiat Yetunde Fowosere, and the couple would have five children together (three sons, two daughters). After passing the Cambridge School Certificate examination, he worked as an assistant in the Government Audit Department. In 1935 he joined the Nigerian Railway and served in the Chief Accountant's Office for nine years. While working at the Nigerian Railway, Elias became an external student of London University, and later he passed the intermediate examinations for the BA and LLB degrees. He left Nigeria for the United Kingdom in 1944 and was admitted to University College London. As this was during World War II, with London the target of frequent bomb attacks, he spent some time at Cambridge's Trinity College. He graduated with a BA the year he entered University College London and two years later received the LLB. In 1947, he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, where he was a Yarborough Anderson Scholar, and in the same year received his LLM degree. He continued his graduate education and became the first African to earn a PhD in law from the University of London in 1949. In 1951, Elias was awarded a UNESCO Fellowship to undertake research into the legal, economic, and social problems of Africa. Later that year he had his first academic appointment, the Simon Senior Research Fellow at Manchester University. There he was an instructor in law and social anthropology. It was also in 1951 that he published his first book, Nigerian Land Law and Custom. Professional life Elias moved from Manchester to Oxford in 1954, when he became the Oppenheimer Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Nuffield College and Queen Elizabeth House. He continued his research into Nigerian law and published Groundwork of Nigerian Law in the same year. In 1956, he was a