Email: P.C.O'Brien@lse.ac.uk
Room: New Academic Building 7.24
Tel: 020-7107-1157
Patrick O’Brien is a Fellow in the Department of Law at the
London School of Economics. He was previously a Research Associate at the
Constitution Unit, and worked on the project on The Politics of Judicial
Independence. He completed his doctoral thesis on The Democratic
Objection to Judicial Review at St. John's College Oxford and also holds
a BCL from Oxford and an LLB from Trinity College Dublin. He qualified as a
barrister in Ireland in 2006. He occasionally writes for the Constitution
Unit and UK Constitutional Law Association blogs.
Research Interests
Public law, human rights, judicial review, judicial studies, legal
philosophy.
External ActivitiesHonorary Research
Associate, Constitution Unit, UCL.
(With R Hazell, K Malleson and G Gee) The Politics of
Judicial Independence in the UK’s Changing Constitution (CUP
2015)
Judicial independence is
generally understood as requiring that judges must be insulated from political
life. The central claim of this work is that far from standing apart from the
political realm, judicial independence is a product of it. It is defined and
protected through interactions between judges and politicians. In short,
judicial independence is a political achievement. This is the main conclusion of
a three-year research project on the major changes introduced by the
Constitutional Reform Act 2005, and the consequences for judicial independence
and accountability. The authors interviewed over 150 judges, politicians, civil
servants and practitioners to understand the day-to-day processes of negotiation
and interaction between politicians and judges. They conclude that the greatest
threat to judicial independence in future may lie not from politicians actively
seeking to undermine the courts, but rather from their increasing disengagement
from the justice system and the judiciary.
click here for publisher's site
(with R Hazell) 'Meaningful Dialogue: Judicial engagement
with parliamentary committees at Westminster' (2016) Public Law
pp.54-73
'Judges and Politics: The Parliamentary Contributions of the Law Lords
1876-2009' (2016) 79 MLR 786-812
There is a common perception that, prior to the exclusion of serving judges from
the House of Lords in 2009, a ‘politics convention’ operated which required
judges to avoid party-political controversy and ensured that they contributed to
debate only rarely. On this view, the presence of the Law Lords in parliament
prior to 2009 presented a judicial independence and separation of powers problem
in theory only. An examination of the contributions of serving Law Lords and
other judicial peers to debates in the House of Lords from 1876–2009 (and
retired judges from 1876–2015) reveals that the convention either did not exist
or was frequently ignored. While most judges were infrequent participants in
parliamentary debate, some were enthusiastic – a small number among the most
active parliamentarians in the Lords. The most active judicial peers were
conservative in their politics and the best predictor that a judge would be
active in the House was an association with conservative politics or causes.
click here for full text via Wiley [ON CAMPUS]
click here for full text via
Wiley [OFF CAMPUS]
‘Changes to Judicial Appointments in the Crime and Courts Act
2013’ [2014] Public law 179.
(Review article with B Yong) ‘Constitutional Systems of the
World: Problems in Comparative Constitutionalism’ (2012) 10 Political Studies
Review 359.
