Dependent on the file — Judicial independence examined through a family court case. A reply to Clivia von Dewitz

German judges are debating whether a judge who signs an open letter calling for a party ban compromises his impartiality. Clivia von Dewitz proposes to measure judicial independence by the way a democracy treats its sharpest critics. This reply applies her test where independence is actually decided: in the file of an ordinary family case. How independent can a judge be when the factual basis of the case has already been fixed by a chain of institutions whose findings no one verified? The file opens with a night in May 2024. The emergency doctor recorded no disorder, yet a clinic held a man for five days on a locked ward, on his wife's account and without any judicial order. No court has ruled on that deprivation of liberty to this day. The label from that night, a psychiatric emergency, then travelled through police reports, two youth welfare offices, a counselling service, two family courts and the public prosecutor's office. None of them examined it; each adopted the report of the one before. Reference replaced verification, and the label ended in the suspension of all contact between a father and his two children. The leaders of the German judges' association and the police union openly describe the overload behind this way of working. Overload explains why existing reports are adopted. It does not explain why every omission ran in the same direction, shielding the account with which the file began and turning the critic who asked for scrutiny into a finding about himself. A judge can be perfectly impartial towards the parties and still decide on a record that already contains its result. Independence therefore needs a second test: whether legal institutions verify the information on which their decisions rest.