Carly Schrever examines how judicial officers at different points in their careers describe their experience of the role and the sources of stress and satisfaction they encounter. Drawing on data from a large-scale national interview study involving 59 judges and magistrates from five Australian courts, this article explores how an awareness of the judicial career cycle can enhance judicial well-being.
Originally published in the May 2026 issue of the Judicial Officers’ Bulletin, the article is reprinted here, light edited, with the author’s permission.
Introduction
The judicial career cycle. This is not a commonly heard phrase. Unlike other roles, for example in medicine, academia, business, and even legal practice — where there is progression with defined stages and transition points, each requiring practical and psychological adjustments — the judicial career has typically been viewed as the final chapter of a legal career for the few fortunate enough to be appointed. It is the endpoint. The culmination of decades of hard work and dedication. An opportunity to step away from the striving and competition of legal practice and give back to the profession and to society. Although some judicial officers are elevated to more senior courts or leadership roles over the course of their careers, there is, by convention, no expectation of progression or promotion once appointed. This is for the very good reason that the integrity of judicial decisions is best preserved when judicial officers are free from the possibility of reward or retribution by the executive government.
The traditional view of the judicial career is as both a pinnacle and a plateau of professional accomplishment. Judicial officers, however, and anyone else who peeks behind the “judicial veil,”1 know this is not the reality. While judges and magistrates2 bring real wisdom and skill to their roles, the judicial career is long — usually between 10 and 30 working years — and across this time the experience and demands are far from static. The small but growing body of international research on judicial well-being, to which the Australian judiciary has been among the most active and generous contributors,3 has demonstrated that judicial life entails many and varied challenges alongside the privileges and rewards of office.4 In the broader literature on career theory and occupational well-being, there exists a large field of scholarship on career cycles and stages,5 however, it appears there is nothing yet on the defining stages of the judicial career.
This article attempts to address this identified gap. Drawing upon data from a large-scale interview study involving 59 judges and magistrates from five Australian courts, it offers a first insight into what is believed to be the only empirically derived understanding of the psychological experience at different stages of the judicial career cycle. A detailed description of the study’s methodology and key findings is set out in the full empirical report: The privilege and the pressure: Judges’ and magistrates’ reflections on the sources and impacts of stress in judicial work.6
An unanticipated but fascinating element of the interview data was how judicial officers at different points in their careers described how they experienced the role and the sources of stress and satisfaction they encountered. The insights have been presented at a number of judicial conferences, which has served to further develop and confirm stages and themes, published for the first time here.
Well-being across the judicial career cycle
As part of the semi-structured interviews, judicial officers were asked what they saw as the major sources of stress in the judicial role, and whether, in their experience, the sources of stress differ at different stages post-appointment. This elicited a rich dataset about how not only the sources of stress, but also the sources of satisfaction, shifted over time, and revealed three very distinct career stages in which the psychological experience was markedly different:
- Stage 1 — the early years (generally 0–5 years post-appointment)
- Stage 2 — the middle years (generally 6–10 years post-appointment but sometimes extending up to 15 years post-appointment)
- Stage 3 — the years before retirement (the final 3–5 years before retirement, often 11–15 years post-appointment).
These three stages emerged consistently across all court levels, however, the approximate year markers for each were slightly different. Judicial officers in the lower courts (i.e. magistrates7), who are often appointed in their late-30s or 40s and then serve 20–30 years in office, described a more protracted “middle years” stage than judges in the intermediate and higher courts, who are more commonly appointed in their late-40s, 50s, or early-60s, often serving 10–15 years.
Stage 1 — the early years
Six broad themes defined how judicial officers spoke about the experience of the first few years in office, as expressed in the quotes below.
Exciting
Many judicial officers looked back on the beginning of their time on the bench as being a period of great excitement and exhilaration. One longer serving magistrate, who had also talked about the difficulties she had gone on to face in the role, also reflected:
When you’re first appointed it’s so exciting to have been appointed and look, notwithstanding all my whinging, I still think this is one of the best jobs in the world. The privilege of being able to get involved in other people’s lives and learn about people’s lives and then maybe have some kind of influence in problem solving is fantastic.
The excitement experienced at the start, while positive and energizing, was usually described as being coupled with some adrenaline and stress, as expressed by this judge:
So, in the first five years everything is new. And you are working hard to get on top of everything, and it’s both exciting and exhilarating, but there’s a lot of pressure because each problem you encounter may be a problem you’re dealing with for the first time.
Terrifying
Another common experience was that the combination of excitement and pressure in the early months and years felt, at times, like “general terror,” especially for those judicial officers in states that do not provide structured or supported induction programs:
[T]he stressors in the initial stages are — I think there’s the fear of just not being able to perform, and I see that with the new judges, they’re always concerned.
However, for some, like this judge, the “sink or swim” experience was seen in hindsight as a painful but necessary part of the adjustment:
It was agony for the first five years. I was terrified. It was like my head’s in the book, the book is not in my head. I had no idea. But I learnt and I learnt and I learnt and I learnt, and it made me better.
Steep learning curve
Whether terrifying or not, the sense of having so much to learn was shared by almost everyone. Judicial officers spoke of facing new situations and challenges each day, including areas of law they had not previously worked in, unexpected courtroom scenarios, internal court processes and technology, and the very fact of being responsible for the ultimate decision. For a significant number, this contributed to a period of intense anxiety and sleeplessness:
When I started it was particularly difficult, particularly stressful. And there was a lot of lying awake at night and worrying and feeling anxious. And that was quite difficult. . . . That was just being on a steep learning curve.
Extraordinarily tiring
A related but distinct theme of the early years was the very common experience of finishing each day feeling extremely tired; not necessarily stressed or overwhelmed. As this longer serving magistrate put it:
I think for me, and I think for most people, it’s a good three months before you feel at least half comfortable in the role, and that you don’t come home absolutely exhausted and have to go to bed at 8.30 p.m.
In addition to the steep learning curve, people cited the “volume and concentration,” “sitting in a new place in the courtroom,” and the need to “present a different personality” as the drivers of this end-of-the-day fatigue. For recent appointees serving in regional courts, the exhaustion of adjusting to the role was compounded by the isolation and long driving that accompanies country circuits:
[W]hen I was first in the country, and having to combine a huge amount of driving — and I was sitting alone, at almost every court I sat at. And I would be crying tired on Friday nights . . . I’d get home and be crying tired. So, on top of everything else I was just exhausted.
Imposter syndrome
An extremely common experience within the first few years of office, shared by judicial officers at all levels of the court hierarchy, was the fear of not being “good enough” to be a judge or magistrate: the fear of being found out as an “imposter” or “fraud.” As expressed by one superior court judge:
[T]here’s always that little nagging feeling that people don’t really know how stupid you are, and you’ve managed to get away with it up until this point in time, but it’s all going to come crashing down.
For many, the fear of “making a fool of yourself” was the motivator to work very hard and “prove [themselves].” There was significant emphasis placed on appellate review as the arbiter of worthiness in the early years. Interestingly, while “imposter syndrome” appeared to be a tenacious and recurring concern, judicial officers in the middle and later years often reflected with satisfaction that they had found a way to resolve it:
[Y]ou know — if I’m going to be appealed, well, good luck! Go for it. I’m pretty confident I can make a reasonable fist of a decision.
Deceptively “cruisy”
A contrasting experience of the early years shared by a small but significant minority, especially those in the higher jurisdictions, was one of initial euphoria and relief from the rigors and intensity of life in legal practice. However, this was usually reflected upon as an illusory “honeymoon period” that masked a different kind of stress:
So I found the first year or two to be quite easy, exhilarating, no stress at all, and I used to joke about that with [the Head of Jurisdiction] who was a close friend, and he said “in about four years, come and talk to me after you’ve been here for four years, and I’m sure you’ll say something different.” And of course he was right. And what I found was that the stress crept up on me. And it started to affect my relationships with people in ways that I’d not experienced before. And I probably didn’t handle it as well as I should’ve, you know. And it’s a cumulative thing.
Stage 2 — the middle years
The middle years — “the period from [approximately] 6 to 10 years post-appointment, when the novelty has worn off but there are still many years ahead”8 — which was touched upon in the interview study’s full report as a particularly challenging time for accessing judicial job satisfaction.9 The middle years were described in qualitatively very different terms to the early years, with five themes encapsulating how judicial officers spoke of this period.
Increasing mastery and confidence
In contrast to the terror, self-doubt, and intensive skill acquisition of the early years, the middle years were described as a period of greater facility with the technical knowledge and craft of judging, and increased confidence to meet the intrinsic demands of the role. As one appellate judge put it:
I think it takes you up to five years to find your, yeah to work out your appropriate methodology, approach, whatever it is . . . how you conduct yourself, how you relate to colleagues, how you behave in court. . . . So, yeah, I certainly look back on the first five years as more stressful than the second.
Waning enthusiasm and job satisfaction
Despite the developing sense of mastery, it was clear from the interviews that the middle years were, from a psychological standpoint, a critically challenging time for most judicial officers. Interviewees pointed to the cumulative impact of work overload, repetition, systemic failings, and traumatic case content, as eroding their enthusiasm and job satisfaction. One magistrate in the middle-years described it this way:
[Y]ou’re just going through that process time and time again. The sermons are often — I call them sermons — but what you’re saying to the people is often the same. And, I mean, I acknowledge that, for example, the role of a magistrate or a judge is not that different to a Broadway actor in that sense — that you’re performing the same play every night, but it’s a different audience. But can you imagine being on Broadway for ten years, you know, performing the same role in that play day in, day out? It’s a useful analogy because it’s not that dissimilar. Even if it was the best role on Broadway — you’d eventually get tired of it. And this is a great job — it is a wonderful job. It just has some serious pitfalls.
Deep fatigue and emotional exhaustion
Another common feature of the middle years was a new kind of exhaustion, quite different from the end-of-the-day tiredness reported in the early years. The descriptions of deep fatigue in the middle years carried a flavor of endurance and resignation, and the sense that neither sleep nor rest could cure it. In the words of one superior court judge:
The relentlessness of what we do . . . [Y]ou finish one case, you have a reserve judgment, and the next one is waiting. And you know that this is going to be the pattern for a decade. . . . So that’s a source of stress; feeling that you can’t get a break. Knowing that it is going to be this intensity for the entire duration of your time here. You don’t get to take your foot off the accelerator at any point. You don’t go part-time. You don’t wind down into retirement . . . and the business about the relentlessness is the lack of control over your work.
Creeping impatience and cynicism
A corollary of waning enthusiasm and deepening exhaustion was, for many, the beginning of a more difficult and corrosive phase in their relationship to the judicial role, in which they described feeling disconnected not only from their sense of job satisfaction but also from their “best judicial self”:
I know that I am not as patient in court as I like to be. . . . I can tell that these days I’m short, occasionally I say things that I regret saying and I don’t like doing that. . . . I can hear it coming out now because I’m not controlling it as well, and I think that’s all stress-related. An example is I’m absolutely over people who keep drunk driving. That’s a culmination of years of having to listen to every excuse under the sun about why people drunk drive or drug drive. Actually, you get over it. But the stress is that, instead of me just keeping my mouth shut, I’m now going “what is it that you don’t understand, you’re suspended.”
“Fork in the road”
Possibly the most interesting theme of the middle years was the view, expressed by many, that this period was a pivotal juncture, the approach of which was determinative of well-being into the second half of the judicial career. As articulated in the interview study’s full report:
The “middle years” of the judicial career — referred to by one judge as “the second ten” — were frequently identified as the period when satisfaction was at its lowest ebb, and consequently as a critical cross-roads at which judicial officers either find a way to renew themselves and stay motivated, or fall into a career malaise from which it is difficult to recover.10
One magistrate said it was visibly apparent among her longer-serving colleagues who had found a way to “stretch [their] wings in the organisation” and those who had not:
If you look at us as a group in a room you can literally see the division, and I don’t know what you do with people who don’t make the transition.
Similarly, a judicial officer, who reported traveling well through the middle years due to deliberate and purposeful engagement with new challenges and projects, described what she saw as the grim alternative:
[Y]ou just get worn down by it . . . you’re feeling a bit isolated, and you think “oh my God, I’ve got another 10, 15, 20 years of this! Can I do this?” It becomes Groundhog Day, and I’m not there yet because I’ve purposely . . . created my own opportunities. But if people don’t have the skill or the knowledge to do that — which they don’t because they’re lawyers, they’re not community people . . . you know, they’re kind of stuck, and then the rot sets in . . . and then you get the cynicism, and that’s dangerous, I think.
The activities judicial officers identified as helping them stay engaged and motivated through the middle years included: becoming involved in judicial education; taking on leadership roles within the court; engaging with community initiatives and diversion programs; and connecting more deeply with national and international judicial associations. The consistent theme was a renewed connection to meaning and purpose through activities that enhanced the judicial officer’s sense of having positive impact — not only on the outcome of individual cases, but on the broader judicial system.
Stage 3 — the years before retirement
Whichever way judicial officers emerge from the middle years transition, there is generally a period of equilibrium before the next significant transition appears on the horizon: retirement. Five themes emerged from this period.
Opportunities for mentoring and leadership
Mentoring junior colleagues and young lawyers was a source of joy to many longer-serving judicial officers:
[A] source of satisfaction is our mentoring role with our associates, and you can see a few photos of them around here. It is very satisfying to try and mentor in the early days of a legal career and see them go on to successful and happy lives, and that’s been very satisfying.
Additionally, judicial officers towards the end of their careers often found themselves in formal leadership positions as Heads of Division, Deputy Chiefs, or Regional Coordinators. The opportunity to shape the court through leadership was often a significant source of satisfaction; however, management responsibilities, especially managing underperformance among judicial colleagues, were frequently described as the most stressful aspects of their working lives.
Increased responsibilities
Outside of formal leadership roles, longer serving judicial officers also spoke of the additional layers of responsibility that come with seniority. An appellate judge reflected that:
[T]he more senior you get, the more stressful it gets in some senses — because the more often you might be the presiding judge and therefore that has additional responsibilities.
In a similar vein, trial judges and magistrates spoke about the extra duties that fall to judicial elders and cultural leaders within the courts:
You feel that you should be contributing to the court, not just in terms of court work . . . you’re taking on the additional responsibilities [of leadership and committees], the role of mentoring other judges. . . . Also, I think as — the more senior you become, the bigger the expectation that you can take on the workload — you can take on the more difficult cases — and still manage everything else.
Burnout and cumulative impact
A distinctive feature of the later years was the way judicial officers took stock of how the role had changed them. Some talked in terms of “burnout” and “vicarious trauma”; others spoke more of the cumulative moral baggage of exercising judicial power:
It’s a burden that kind of grows — I mean, I don’t want to paint it too negatively — because it’s exciting and interesting work — but you know, I think there’s a sense that you carry the burden of all these decisions that you’ve made over a long period of time.
Younger judicial officers sometimes commented on the patterns they observed in their long-serving colleagues, highlighting two apparent and distinct paths the cumulative impact can take:
I’ve seen it with judges who are nearing the end of their careers; they vary, it’s got to be said, some of them you’d only be able to take out here in a box to be honest, they love it so much, and they are so comfortable with it, and they’d love the retirement age to be 80 rather than 70. There are others that have just had it, are worn out. . . . I get the sense that there’s a cohort of judges nearing the latter part of their career who are just exhausted by it all, are exhausted by all those stresses that I mentioned before have accumulated over time, and they’re just done with it, and they’d leave if they could.
Deep identification with the judicial role
One of the ways people often recognized being changed by their judicial career was the degree to which the role had shaped their sense of self. For many, the role of “judge” or “magistrate” had become the dominant and defining aspect of their identity. As this judge describes, deep identification with the judicial role can have both positive and negative implications for the judicial officer:
I think there’s a great risk in this job, and you see it all the time with people doing what I call just disappearing into the job — the job comes to define them, I think if a job comes to define you, that can be a good thing because it means you love what you’re doing and so on, but it can be simply because you’ve got nothing else to do.
Ambivalence about retirement
Connected to this deep identification with the role, judicial officers nearing the end of their careers on the bench frequently spoke with trepidation and mixed feelings about their approaching retirement. Notwithstanding the rigors and demands of the role, and the associated fatigue experienced by many, the prospect of “leaving a job that you’re so bound up in” was seen as an extraordinary loss. For some, life beyond the bench was hard to imagine:
[A]s I get older I worry about if I am a workaholic. And my wife says, “if you ever retire, what are you going to do?” I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Transitions — the unifying theme
The common element across these three distinct career stages is that they each describe a significant transition in professional identity. Stage 1 involves the transition from legal practice to judicial office, and to inhabiting for the first time a public role upon which layers of ideals and mystique have been projected for centuries. Stage 2 involves the transition from novelty to endurance, and the challenge of finding peace with systemic challenges beyond the judicial officers’ control. And Stage 3 involves the transition from one of the most venerated positions in our society and many years of purposeful and highly consequential work to a very different pace of life. Transitions are not merely changes in role or context, but involve a more fundamental psychological process of identity reconstruction — requiring individuals to relinquish prior ways of being and, over time, “become other people”.11 In psychology, transitions are understood to have three phases:
- Letting go — in which we separate from our old way of being.
- Liminal — in which we are in between the old and the new identity.
- New beginning — in which we embrace our new life and identity.12
Even when moving towards something desired and positive, such as a judicial appointment, transitions are by definition disruptive and uncomfortable. They always involve some loss and some degree of unfamiliarity and uncertainty. But they can be destabilizing or growthful, complete or incomplete, depending on the level of consciousness and acceptance we bring to them. As William Bridges, one of the leading voices on transition psychology, explains:
[C]hange is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t “take.”13
What to do with this insight
Describing the judicial experience at different stages of the career cycle may be interesting, but how does it help? Awareness of these stages and considering them through the lens of transition psychology provides an important and helpful frame for many within the judiciary and judicial institutions:
- Individual judicial officers — forewarned is forearmed; knowing what to expect at different stages in the judicial journey helps us make sense of that experience when it hits. This is particularly important during the middle years transition, when it appears so much rests on the individual judge’s attitude and ability to recognise where their waning enthusiasm might be coming from and to renew their engagement with the privilege and possibilities of the judicial role. Normalizing uncomfortable experiences at predictable stages is also key to strengthening our capacity to accept and tolerate the discomfort: The fact that you’re not alone; it’s so important to go; you’re not mentally ill; you haven’t imagined this; there is nothing wrong with you; these are normal stresses. That’s okay to be feeling anxious and terrified, you know all those things. I think it’s really important.
- Judicial leaders — recognizing that judicial well-being needs differ at different stages — can consider what pastoral and organizational supports could be provided across the career. This is especially in the early years, when the messages and assistance new judicial officers receive in induction can shape their professional identity in enduring ways.
- Judicial associations and education bodies —allowing these insights to inform training and discussion among judicial officers — can ensure a diversity of experience and perspectives is more directly accommodated. Typically, the early-years transition has been well catered for in judicial education, but the middle-years and retirement transitions have not usually received the same attention. Building awareness of these two additional pressure points and how to navigate them could enhance judicial satisfaction and high functioning throughout their career.
It was clear from the interviews that judicial officers experienced the role very differently at different stages of their career, and their well-being needs were also markedly different. This article has sought to describe the three distinct stages that judicial officers spoke about and to apply transition psychology to consider how awareness of the judicial career cycle can enhance judicial well-being and performance.
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- David Heilpern, “Lifting the Judicial Veil: Vicarious Trauma, PTSD, and the Judiciary — A Personal Story,” paper presented at the Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation Annual Lecture, Sydney, Australia (Oct. 25, 2017).
- This research was conducted prior to the change from the Office of Magistrate to the Office of Judge of the Local Court of NSW (28 March 2026). The term magistrate is used throughout.
- See Kathy Mack, Anne Wallace & Sharyn Roach Anleu, Judicial Workload: Time, Tasks and Work Organisation, Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration Research Report, 2012; Sharyn Roach Anleu & Kathy Mack, “Magistrates’ everyday work and emotional labour,” 32(4) J. of Law and Soc’y 590 (2005); Sharyn Roach Anleu & Kathy Mack, Judging and Emotion: A Socio-Legal Analysis (2021); Carly Schrever, Carol A. Hulbert & Tania Sourdin, “The Psychological Impact of Judicial Work: Australia’s First Empirical Research Measuring Judicial Stress and Well-Being,” 28(3) J. of Jud. Admin. 141 (2019) (hereinafter “The Psychological Impact of Judicial Work”); Carly Schrever, Carol A. Hulbert & Tania Sourdin, “Where Stress Presides: Predictors and Correlates of Stress Among Australian Judges and Magistrates,” 29(2) Psychiatry, Psych. & L. 290 (2022) (hereinafter “Where Stress Presides”); Carly Schrever, Carol A. Hulbert & Tania Sourdin, “The Privilege and the Pressure: Judges’ and Magistrates’ Reflections on the Sources and Impacts of Stress in Judicial Work,” 31(3) Psychiatry, Psych. & L. 327 (2024) (hereinafter “The Privilege and the Pressure”); Carly Schrever et al., “Preliminary Findings from a Large-Scale National Study Measuring Judicial Officers’ Psychological Reactions to Their Work and Workplace,” 36(6) Jud. Officers’ Bull. 53 (2024).
- Schrever et al., “The Psychological Impact of Judicial Work,” supra n.3; Schrever et al., “Where Stress Presides,” supra n.3; Schrever et al., “The Privilege and the Pressure,” supra n.3; Sharyn Roach Anleu & Kathy Mack, “Job Satisfaction and the Judiciary” 28(5) Work, Emp. & Soc’y 683 (2014).
- Sarah Bankins et al., “Navigating Career Stages in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Systemic Interdisciplinary Review and Agenda for Future Research,” 153 J. of Vocational Behav. 104011 (2024); Troy S. Buer et al., “Revisiting a Faculty Career Management Life Cycle Model: Anticipating and Navigating Career Transitions in Academic Medicine,” 31(4) J. of Clinical Psych. in Med. Settings 648 (2024).
- Schrever et al., “The Privilege and the Pressure,” supra n.3.
- See supra n.2.
- Schrever et al., “The Privilege and the Pressure,” supra n.3, at 356.
- Id. at 355–356.
- Id. at 355.
- Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (2003); Susan Bridges & William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change (3rd ed. 2009).
- Sheryl Paul, The Wisdom of Anxiety: How Worry & Intrusive Thoughts Are Gifts to Help You Heal 64-65 (2019).
- Bridges & Bridges, supra n.11, at xii.