This chapter examines the role and responsibilities of a chief justice. Using the judicial legitimacy values propounded by Richard Devlin and Adam Dodek, we argue that a ‘successful’ chief justice will promote and protect these values as they negotiate and manage the many relational dimensions of the role with other judges, with the executive, the Parliament, the profession, the academy, the media, and the wider public. Our study highlights interpretative disputes, including as to whether an individual chief justice has responded to genuine, as opposed to improperly perceived, threats to judicial values and about how a chief justice might best navigate between the values, particularly as new values, such as representativeness and efficiency, can appear in opposition to more traditional values. Such questions are symptomatic of ongoing disagreement about the fragility of judicial values, particularly independence, as well as the subjective nature of any attempt to evaluate judicial performance. We argue that there is a need for a more developed normative framework to better understand – and critique – the individual choices and actions of chief justices.

This chapter considers the (often hidden) role of judicial collegiality in a multi-member court, looking at the Australian High Court experience within a comparative perspective. In unravelling the tensions within the different deployments of the concept of ‘collegiality’, it explores the potential for various inter-judicial dynamics to affect the performance and achievement of the judicial mission. It traverses the institutional influences on collegiality and how the concept contributes to institutional dynamics. Finally, it grapples with the argument of whether collegiality is emerging as a judicial value, and what this means for the role of the judge and the court.

The publication of a dissenting judgment is overt evidence of judicial disagreement and judicial difference. This chapter starts to explore the factors that underpin this judicial difference. Drawing on a method of content analysis of legal judgments grounded in theories and techniques from psychology, this chapter highlights the values that underpin decision making and disagreement in the High Court of Australia. The value analysis provides an insight into division in the High Court reframing the discussion of dissent from differences in understandings of the law to differences in the values espoused and affirmed by the individual decision maker. Rather than a binary decision between one outcome and another, value analysis of the judgments frames judicial decision-making as a nuanced balancing of competing value(s) by the individual Justices. In doing so, the chapter presents a value-decision paradigm with differential patterns of values expression associated with opposing positions in hard cases. Value expression provides an element of consistency in decision making across these difficult cases, but the analysis of values also highlights the complex nature of the High Court decision-making process and the many factors that may influence the final outcome.

Technology is often seen as having transformational capacity to improve societal institutions, and the judiciary has not been an exception to this trend. For a number of years, courts around the world have invested in digital uplift projects. Beyond the routine use of technology to improve judicial systems, which is widely accepted and largely self-explanatory, many jurisdictions are increasingly investigating more sophisticated applications. Governments and courts are asking whether and to what extent machine learning techniques and other artificial intelligence applications should play a role in assisting tribunals and judiciary in decision making. In this chapter, we ask how these new uses of technology might, in turn, impact judicial values and judges’ own sense of themselves, and even transform the judicial role in contemporary societies. We do this through a focused examination of core judicial values, namely transparency and accountability, independence, impartiality, diversity and efficiency and how they may be either supported or undermined by increasing technologization.

The emotional dimensions of judicial work are investigated from various perspectives and methods. A focus of this emerging research is the idea that emotion is not entirely spontaneous, uncontrolled or irrational. Emotions can be resources in everyday judicial work, as well as needing regulation. This chapter investigates judicial experience and display of emotion, including judicial officers’ observations, anticipation or perception of the emotion of others, and the practices judicial officers adopt to manage their own emotions and those of others. Close examination of two segments from interviews with judicial officers using a sociological framework draws out the layered dimensions of judicial emotion work. Although this work occurs within institutional and organisational constraints, in particular the dominant cultural script of judicial dispassion, this analysis demonstrates multiple ways emotion is a resource to achieve practical, normative and ethical goals and confirms the intertwining of emotion work with judicial work.