A Critical Theory of Women’s Property Rights in Northern Nigerian Private Law: Patriarchy, Law, and Resistance

Women's property rights in northern Nigerian private law are systemically constrained by the intersecting operations of patriarchal customary norms, selective applications of Islamic inheritance law, statutory frameworks that fail to protect women in practice, and institutional biases in the adjudication process, creating a structural apparatus of property deprivation that demands critical theoretical engagement. This study advances a critical theory of women's property rights in northern Nigerian private law, developing an original Intersectional Property Rights Framework (IPRF) that integrates feminist legal theory, critical race theory, Islamic jurisprudence, and African customary law analysis to explain the multi-layered operation of women's property deprivation across Kano, Sokoto, and Borno States. Using a transformative multi-site empirical methodology involving 140 structured and unstructured interviews with rural and urban women, legal practitioners, Sharia court judges, customary court officials, and women's rights organisations, supplemented by doctrinal analysis of statutory frameworks and case law from 2015 to 2024, the research constructs the IPRF as its original theoretical contribution. The IPRF identifies the mechanisms through which patriarchy, law, and resistance interact to shape women's property outcomes in northern Nigeria, advancing original propositions about the potential for legal reform to transform deeply embedded social norms. Findings reveal that legal reform alone is insufficient without transformative social and institutional interventions. Recommendations include a Women's Property Rights Act, gender-sensitive judicial training, community legal empowerment programmes, and Islamic jurisprudence engagement on gender-equal inheritance. Keywords: women's property rights, feminist legal theory, northern Nigeria, customary law, intersectionality