Ramnik Shah reflects on the life of Justice Madan, a ‘homegrown Kenyan jurist of the highest order’, and his ‘immense contribution to the political and legal history of Kenya’.

Despite official rhetoric about the separation of powers, colonial-era judges were routinely ‘used as an instrument of policy’, with this relationship between administration and judiciary essentially sustained after independence, writes Ramnik Shah, in a discussion of Kenya’s post-colonial legal system.