Abstract
This study applies Semantic Role Labelling to the 2025 Federal High Court judgement in Federal Republic of Nigeria v. Nnamdi Kanu to examine how judicial reasoning is linguistically structured in a contentious political trial. While language is central to adjudication, few studies have used computational methods to map the semantic architecture of judicial decisions in Nigerian jurisprudence. Grounded in Frame Semantics and Legal Realism, the research pursues two objectives: first, to identify patterns of semantic role assignment to key actors, particularly the Court and the Defendant; second, to examine how the Court uses predicate-argument structures to construct authority, manage disagreement, and project legal certainty. Through manual annotation of predicates and their arguments, the analysis reveals consistent asymmetry. The Court predominantly occupies the ARG0-Agent role for high-authority predicates such as rule, convict and find, reinforcing institutional dominance. The Defendant is recurrently assigned ARG1-Patient and Theme roles, constructing a narrative of passivity and liability. The Court manages rights-based claims through semantic neutralisation via role reassignment, while extraordinary rendition is isolated into separate semantic frames that limit its bearing on the substantive ruling. Sequences of certainty predicates further project judicial finality through epistemic stacking. The findings demonstrate that SRL provides a replicable framework for transforming unstructured judicial text into quantifiable semantic data. By making the ‘who-did-what-to-whom’ structure explicit, SRL complements doctrinal analysis and reveals the linguistic mechanisms through which judicial legitimacy is constructed.
Keywords: Semantic Role Labelling, Judicial Reasoning, Legal Language, Nigerian Judgements, FRN v. Nnamdi Kanu
DOI: 10.36349/sojolics.2026.v02i01.047
author/Koki, H. A., & Dan’Azumi, A.
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 2(1) | June 2026 |
