On December 19, 2022, Professor Emerita Leah Wortham spoke on Comparative Problems in Approaching Judicial Independence at a hybrid conference on Legal Comparativism in Legislative and Political Discourse: Legality or Abuse. The conference was sponsored by Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland, and Osnabrück University, Germany.

Wortham serves as a co-reporter for the European Law Institute Project on Mount Scopus European Standards on Judicial Independence. She was joined on the program by fellow co-reporters Shimon Shetreet, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. dr hab. Fryderyk Zoll, Professor at Osnabrück University and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Wortham applied her past five years of research with Professor Zoll on judicial independence issues in Poland to the challenges of developing effective standards for safeguarding judicial independence across political systems. She emphasized the importance of Professor Shetreet’s concept of a “culture of judicial independence,” the supporting web of institutions and attitudes that are needed for safeguarding any formal system to protect the judiciary as an institution and individual judges from improper pressure to influence the outcome of judicial decisions.