Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
This event was organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Dr Patrick O'Brien (Oxford Brookes University)
Chair: Prof Myriam Hunter-Henin (UCL Laws)
Respondents: Prof Erin Delaney (UCL Laws) and Luis Soto Tamayo (UCL Laws)
About the talk
We typically think of judicial independence as a constitutional principle. In this paper Dr Patrick O’Brien argues, however, that it is also a professional value: the core professional value of judges. In the past two decades there have been significant changes to this value: it has been transformed from an informal and convention-based ‘old’ judicial independence to a legalistic and highly formal ‘new’ judicial independence.
Constitutional narratives tend to treat this change (embodied in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005) as a response to international legal and human rights norms around the separation of powers. This narrative underplays the broader drivers of change: profound societal changes to the way that we think about, develop and sustain trust in institutions and professions in the modern state.
At the core of this new judicial independence, therefore, is a belief that more rules and more formal accountability equate to more trust. Dr Patrick O’Brien suggests that this is problematic. We do not trust judges purely for rational reasons, or because they are heavily regulated, but also for the entirely circular reason that they are judges, occupying a traditional authority role. Rule-based trust systems fail to fully capture this dimension of trust. In fact, they may damage it.
This seminar was part of the Public Law Seminar Series.
This event was organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.
Speaker: Dr Patrick O'Brien (Oxford Brookes University)
Chair: Prof Myriam Hunter-Henin (UCL Laws)
Respondents: Prof Erin Delaney (UCL Laws) and Luis Soto Tamayo (UCL Laws)
About the talk
We typically think of judicial independence as a constitutional principle. In this paper Dr Patrick O’Brien argues, however, that it is also a professional value: the core professional value of judges. In the past two decades there have been significant changes to this value: it has been transformed from an informal and convention-based ‘old’ judicial independence to a legalistic and highly formal ‘new’ judicial independence.
Constitutional narratives tend to treat this change (embodied in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005) as a response to international legal and human rights norms around the separation of powers. This narrative underplays the broader drivers of change: profound societal changes to the way that we think about, develop and sustain trust in institutions and professions in the modern state.
At the core of this new judicial independence, therefore, is a belief that more rules and more formal accountability equate to more trust. Dr Patrick O’Brien suggests that this is problematic. We do not trust judges purely for rational reasons, or because they are heavily regulated, but also for the entirely circular reason that they are judges, occupying a traditional authority role. Rule-based trust systems fail to fully capture this dimension of trust. In fact, they may damage it.
This seminar was part of the Public Law Seminar Series.
