What is the role of government lawyers? Are they merely agents of their client agencies in court, or do they have a broader function within the world of administrative dispute resolution? On the face of the matter, the lawyer within an adversarial legal system is required to present, to the best of her ability, her client's case in court. The lawyer for the government, however, is not just a professional jurist, but also a public official who is committed to the principles of the rule of law and the constitution. Over the last decade, this tension between the loyalty of the public lawyer to her client and her integrity as a legal bureaucrat who forms an essential element in the process of judicial review has drawn the attention of lawyers and legal scholars.

In this article I describe a model of Public Law litigation in which governmental lawyers play a much more complex role than that of solely being legal agents who seek to maximize their client's rate of success in court. This is the case in Public Law litigation in Israel before the High Court of Justice, where the government's lawyers function not only as representatives of their client agencies but also, in some cases, as arbitrators who handle legal disputes without the intervention of the Court.

Judicial independence is regarded as an essential condition for the rule of law and separation of powers — two pillars of liberal democracy. Judicial independence ought to include components to secure independence on the individual level, as well as components to secure independence on the institutional level of courts. The most important objects of judicial independence are the other branches of government, but some degree of independence from the general public and from other judges is required as well. These features of independence can be achieved by rigid and entrenched arrangements regarding tenure, immunity from wage decrease, special procedures for appointment and promotion of judges, mechanisms for the allocation of cases to judges and the composition of the benches, and more.