Conclusion
Many social institutions require some accommodation of accountability and independence. Typically, though, the institutions are accountable to and independent from the same entity.
So, for example, legislators are accountable to their constituents by means of elections, but are on the Burkean conception to be independent from the constituents as well; the media are accountable to, but independent from, the public. In these settings it is natural to speak of a trade-off between independence and accountability. The situation may be different for judges and courts. As I have argued, there is a trade-off between accountability to and independence from the public, instantiated in methods of judicial selection and removal. Yet, courts and judges are also, or perhaps even primarily, accountable to the law. There is no direct trade-off here with independence: a judge who acted independently of the law would be corrupt or lawless. Yet, under contemporary understandings ‘the law' is ultimately grounded in human choice, and so accountability to law is accountability to someone. Ultimately it is accountability to the past authors of the law, but proximately, I have argued, it is accountability to contemporaries in the legal profession, who identify the modes of reasoning they take as defining what acting according to law is.Judicial accountability and its obverse judicial independence are important components of constitutional design. Their relationship is complex, with numerous variants in design that all can achieve any specified accommodation of accountability and independence. In addition, it seems unlikely that the general principles of liberal democracy dictate one, or even a few, basic versions of appropriate accommodations. Those who are concerned about judicial accountability and independence probably must be satisfied with judgments that systems have ‘enough’ or ‘not enough' accountability and independence.