It is an unexpected observation from someone with such a rich CV. Someone whose journey has taken him from Strathmore Law School to Harvard Law School, through Cambridge and New York and back to Nairobi. For Nyaga Dominic, however, the observation captures a philosophy that has shaped his trajectory. Credentials matter only to the extent that they prepare one to undertake work that matters. 

Nearly a decade after joining Strathmore University as a law student, Dominic returns to the Sir Thomas More Building (STMB), this time appointed to the adjunct faculty to teach Constitutional Law. It is a homecoming that brings him back to the very place where his interest in the role of law in public life, constitutionalism and in the building of  institutions was first explored.

“It is slightly surreal,” he reflects.

“There are still classrooms I walk into where I remember exactly where I used to sit. Sometimes I am standing at the front discussing constitutional history and suddenly remember being 21, sitting on the other side, trying to think out what kind of lawyer I wanted to become.”

The setting is familiar as he puts it, but the perspective is not. He returns not only to the adjunct faculty at Strathmore Law School, but as Lead Counsel at Nyaga Dominic & Co. Advocates, where he advises businesses, investors and public and private institutions on constitutional, commercial, regulatory and cross-border matters. To him, those two roles are inseparable. 

“Teaching forces clarity,” he says. “Practice ensures that the questions you bring into the lecture theatres are alive.” 

A Foundation in Law and Public Life

Dominic’s interest in constitutional law took hold during his undergraduate years at Strathmore.  One of his earliest research papers examined the tension between national security and the principle of non-refoulement at a time when Kenya was in a difficult national debate about refugees and the future of Kakuma refugee camp. 

“I remember taking the paper seriously enough to go around looking for people who would challenge it, ” he recalls. 

That search led him to the constitutional lawyer and former legislator Hon. Gitobu Imanyara. What began as an academic conversation evolved into a professional relationship. Dominic would later spend more than five years working with Imanyara at his firm and as an editor at The Platform for Law, Justice and Society, immersing himself in a tradition of Kenyan lawyers who regarded constitutionalism and the rule of law not as academic subjects but as questions of public life.

During his time at Strathmore, Dominic also received the Chief Justice C.B. Madan Student Laureate Prize in recognition of his contribution to constitutionalism and the rule of law. “The recognition reinforced something I had already begun to believe,” he says. “Law should never stop in textbooks. Its real value lies in how it shapes institutions, protects human dignity and improves the lives of the people living under a constitution.”

He describes the Founding Dean, Professor Luis Franceschi, immediate former Assistant Secretary General of the Commonwealth of Nations, as both a teacher and an institution-builder who demonstrated that intellectual excellence, public service and responsibility need not live in separate worlds.  “Professor Franceschi encouraged many of us to see law not simply as a profession but as a vocation with consequences beyond ourselves,” he says. “His example showed that teaching, institution-building and public service are not separate paths. They can be part of the same life.”

After graduating, Dominic remained at Strathmore as an adjunct Graduate Teaching  Assistant before qualifying as an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya. He would later read for a Master of Laws at Harvard Law School, carrying with him many of the questions that had first surfaced in those early years at Strathmore.   

Expanding the frame

If Strathmore gave Dominic a strong foundation in law, Harvard expanded the range of questions he believed lawyers should be prepared to confront.

At the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he worked alongside mathematicians, lawyers, technologists, scientists and public policy experts examining the institutional consequences of emerging technologies. He cross-registered at the Harvard Kennedy School to better understand government and did clinical work on negotiation and dispute system design through the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP).

“The best lawyers I have encountered rarely think in only one discipline,” he says. The experience deepened his conviction that many of today’s most important opportunities cannot be understood through legal doctrine alone. “Difficult problems rarely arrive neatly labelled as legal problems,” he explains. “They come wrapped in technology, markets, politics, incentives and human behaviour.”

The idea echoes Charlie Munger’s well-known warning about “the man with a hammer syndrome”: the tendency to see every problem through the lens of the one discipline a person knows best. “To the man with only a hammer,” Munger observed,” every problem looks pretty much like a nail.” Lawyers, Dominic believes, are particularly susceptible to that temptation.

“Legal training is indispensable,” he says, “but sound judgment often requires us to understand the wider system in which the law operates. Sometimes the legal question is only one part of a much larger institutional, political or commercial problem.”  That interdisciplinary instinct now runs through his work across commercial practice, constitutional law, artificial intelligence, digital governance and institutional development. Increasingly, though, his attention has shifted from new technologies to the institutions expected to govern it.

For me, the important question is not simply how African countries adopt emerging technologies,” he says. “It is whether African institutions will help shape the rules, standards and systems through which emerging technologies are governed.” He pauses before adding the question that animates much of his recent work. “How do we help shape the standards, ideas and institutions governing these technologies, instead of reacting to decisions made elsewhere?”

Behind it lies a broader conviction: that legal expertise is rarely the end of the inquiry. More often, it is the beginning.

Choosing Where to Build 

“I remember asking myself whether I wanted to be the tail of a lion or the head of a mouse.” It was one of the hardest decisions of his career.  “The further away I was from Kenya, the more clearly I began to see it,” Dominic reflects. “At some point, I stopped asking where the next opportunity was and began asking where I could add the most value.”

Distance brought an unexpected clarity. Many of the questions that occupied him abroad are the ones he is now helping clients and institutions resolve: how institutions earn trust, how technology reshapes governance, how businesses navigate regulatory change and how African markets, and hope to spend his life answering them.  And he has become convinced that much of the answering would happen here: in Kenya, across East Africa and on a wider continent.

“Our role at the firm is to help clients navigate complexity with clarity, structure sound decisions and act with confidence,” he explains. It is a view rooted in a changing understanding of legal practice. As information becomes more accessible, clients are less constrained by access to legal knowledge than by the ability to exercise sound judgment. 

“Technology can retrieve information almost instantly,” Dominic says. “What clients continue to value is judgment.” They rarely come to a lawyer seeking an abstract recital of legal principles. “They want to understand the choices before them, the risks attached to those choices and the course most likely to solve the underlying problem. Our task is to bring clarity, structure and judgment to those decisions.”

Teaching Beyond the Textbook

The same philosophy shapes Dominic’s teaching. He treats constitutional law as a study of power, institutions, incentives and human experience.

“Constitutional law is not simply about memorising provisions or judicial decisions,” he says. “It is about understanding how power is created, distributed, restrained and exercised.”

In his first Constitutional Law class, he posed what seemed like a simple question: what if the Constitution had been suspended that morning? The discussion quickly moved beyond doctrine. Students began asking what such a decision would mean for the courts, Parliament, executive authority, individual rights and the ordinary assumptions on which public life depends.

“I wanted them to see that the Constitution is not an abstract text sitting above society,” he explains. “It structures government, protects rights and defines the terms on which public power may be exercised.” His aim, he says, is to form lawyers who understand the consequences of institutional decisions and advise responsibly when the answers are not obvious. 

“A technically correct lawyer can still give profoundly unwise advice,” he says. “Legal education must therefore form judgment and a sense of responsibility, not simply transmit information.”

Teaching, in this view, is as much formation as instruction. Students must master doctrine, but they must also learn how to exercise judgment when legal rules point in different directions or leave competing interests unresolved.

“The most difficult questions are rarely difficult because no legal rule exists,” he says. “They are difficult because several legitimate interests are in tension, and someone must decide how they should be reconciled.” 

 Writing for the Public 

In his writing for Business Daily, he examines the intersection of law, technology, markets and institutional development, from Africa’s growing dependence on foreign artificial intelligence systems and digital infrastructure to the concentration of power in technology markets and the institutional choices that accompany technological change.

For him, public writing is not separate from legal practice. It is an extension of it.

“Some legal questions affect far more people than those seated around a client conference table,” he says. “Writing lets lawyers contribute to the wider public conversation about the institutions, technologies and markets  we are  building.”

The same interdisciplinary instinct that shapes his advisory work informs his writing. Law matters, he believes, but so do economics, technology, incentives and psychology because law does not operate in vacuum. 

So, he hopes his writing does more than explain legal developments. It should help businesses, policymakers and citizens think more clearly about the choices that shape markets and public institutions long before those choices harden into  disputes.

“A lawyer should sometimes be able to contribute before there is a client in the room,” he says. “Public writing, at its best, improves the quality of the conversation.”

Mentorship, Responsibility and Coming Full Circle  

“The legal profession has a remarkable way of bringing people full circle,” he reflects. “The people who once welcomed you to the profession may eventually become your peers.” Dominic speaks about the transition with gratitude and a growing sense of responsibility.

He sees his return to Strathmore as an opportunity to help form lawyers who will one day advise businesses, shape institutions and exercise public responsibility in their own right. “Receiving a good education creates a responsibility,” he says. “At some point, you have to ask what you will build with what others invested in you.”

 The View From the Mountain Top 

 Away from clients, lectures and public writing, Dominic finds perspective in the mountains. He has climbed both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro.

“When you are climbing Kilimanjaro at three in the morning, nobody cares where you studied or what appointment you hold,” he says with a smile. “You simply focus on the next step.” Perhaps that is the real lesson of the mountain. A legal career, in much the same way, is measured not by the institutions one enters or the distinctions one accumulates, but by the people one serves, the institutions to which one adds value and the judgment one leaves behind. That, for Nyaga Dominic, is where building matters. 

Article written by: Evans Ijakaa