William O'Brien (judge)

William O'Brien (1832–1899) was an Irish judge. He is mainly remembered now for presiding at the trials which resulted from the Phoenix Park murders. He was a noted bibliophile.

He was born at Bloomfield, County Cork, son of John O'Brien and his wife Mary Bunbury of Kilfeade. He went to school in Midleton, entered Gray's Inn in 1852 and was called to the Irish Bar in 1855, becoming Queen's Counsel in 1872. To supplement his earnings he also worked for a time as a journalist. He built up a large practice and became wealthy enough to endow a chapel in Newman University Church, St. Stephen's Green. Elrington Ball regarded him as a fine criminal lawyer: Maurice Healy thought he was rather lazy, with the traditional barrister's fault of arguing a case without having read his brief properly. Unlike most ambitious barristers of the time he did not show much interest in politics, although he stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons in 1879.

He was appointed a judge of the High Court of Justice in Ireland in 1882, serving in the Queen's Bench Division until his death in 1899. Even his glowing obituary in the Law Times admitted that he had not been highly thought of as a barrister, and it was believed that he owed his appointment to the influence of his friend the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Sir Edward Sullivan, 1st Baronet, who was almost all- powerful in this sphere. Apart from the Phoenix Park case, his most notable trial was of Patrick Delaney for the attempted murder of O'Brien's colleague James Anthony Lawson. He never married.

From the 1880s, O'Brien amassed a large collection of antiquarian books, bequeathed on his death to the Irish province of the Jesuits, who put it up for auction in 2017.

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