What is encompassed by the idea of ‘style’ in judicial reasons and why might this be of value and something worth striving for in a judge’s performance of their role? Through a synthesis of judicial pronouncements on the topic from judges in common law jurisdictions, the author identifies recurring themes and typologies that are used by judges when they reflect upon what is meant by style – and the manifestations of which are to be, respectively, applauded and emulated or lamented and avoided. Lynch frames this discussion in the context of the High Court of Australia’s contemporary practice of ‘joining in’ to a draft opinion any justice who agrees with it, so that individual authorship is obscured from plain view. This practice reveals an interesting dynamic between the individual and institutional conceptions of the judicial role. 'Joining in' , and its consequences for the benefits that are to be obtained by the conscious development of individual judicial style, is contrasted with the modes of collective expression of agreement in the final courts of the United Kingdom and United States.

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.

Perhaps one of the most enduring legal controversies in recent decades, at least in the public sphere, relates to the acceptability of ‘judicial activism’ as a practice on the bench. Activism, of course, has no fixed definition; nor is it a term that has been adopted with any great zeal by Australian practitioners or the academy. But there is no doubt that the early, benign (if simplistic) understanding of activism as a binary opposite to judicial restraint has been overshadowed by a particularly rancorous public debate about the supposedly growing numbers of progressive activists radically departing not from mere restraint but from judicial ‘orthodoxy’.

This chapter provides an up-to-date survey of the usages of the activist label in Australia, and contends that the rubric of activism obstructs, rather than buttresses, a sophisticated and robust critique of judicial decision-making. The increasing difficulty in untangling the language of activism from public understandings of judicial work is acknowledged, given that the nature of debate on the role of the judiciary has markedly changed in Australian political discourse over the last three decades. The chapter examines the reasons for the persistence of the unhelpful term, and examines the potential for the judiciary and wider legal community to push for public discourse to move beyond activism as a means of analysis.

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.