'My Lord' Stays: Uganda's Judiciary Rejects Bid to Retire Colonial Courtroom Rituals

A quiet constitutional argument is playing out in Uganda's courtrooms, and it concerns two words: 'My Lord'.

The Uganda Law Society issued a directive instructing lawyers to stop addressing judges as 'My Lord' or 'My Lady', and to abandon the practice of bowing when entering and leaving court. The Society argued that these are colonial-era inheritances — the wigs-and-deference apparatus of British courts transplanted onto African soil — and should give way to simpler, more modern forms of address.

The judiciary has rejected the directive outright, declining to accept that a professional body can unilaterally rewrite the protocol of the courts.

The dispute is smaller than the questions it opens. Across the continent, post-independence states inherited legal systems, procedures and rituals wholesale from their colonisers, and the debate over which to keep has never quite resolved. Some argue the formality of the courtroom — the honorifics, the bow, the robes — communicates the gravity of justice and the independence of the bench, whatever its origins. Others see costume drama borrowed from a system built to rule Africans rather than serve them.

What gives the argument weight is timing. Judiciaries across East Africa are under intense public scrutiny over their independence, their handling of political cases and their distance from the citizens they serve. A profession quarrelling over how to address a judge is also, unavoidably, a profession asking what a judge is for — and to whom the courtroom belongs.