As a young lawyer working for the Chief Justice of Ireland, I would visit his chambers almost every day – often multiple times a day. There, amidst the oak furniture, heavy curtains, and blizzard of court submissions was the unshakeable sense of judicial power; the sense of judgemade law in utero, to be birthed later in the more austere setting of the Supreme Court itself. Having been the Chief Justice’s chambers for almost a century, it took little imagination to picture the first Chief Justice of an independent Ireland in the 1920s, Hugh Kennedy, tackling his judicial duties under new constitutional arrangements that differed radically from the unentrenched British constitution under which all Irish lawyers had been trained. The Constitution of 1922 lay in the slipstream of more modern constitutions, with its separation of State powers, bill of rights, and, crucially, express conferral on the superior courts of the power to review ordinary law for compatibility with the Constitution. That power would be amplified under the new Constitution of 1937, adopted to sweep away most of the remaining constitutional vestiges of British rule.