As a newly arrived Washington correspondent a few years ago, I made the obligatory call to the late Alistair Cooke, doyen and paragon of this newspaper's reporters from America. The hardest thing for most British people to understand about the American political system, he told me, was how important the judges and courts are within it. Few differences, he suggested, better illustrate the deceptive belief that Britain and America instinctively look at the world through the same eyes.That conversation came back to mind this week, and not just because John McCain was in London to deliver the first Alistair Cooke memorial lecture last night. It came to mind because George Bush is crossing the Atlantic in his turn this week, and is leaving behind a Washington in rare ferment. Yet the subject that has galvanised the American capital and that will be uppermost in the president's concerns during his trip to the G8 summit will not be global poverty or climate change, nor even Iraq.Even over the Fourth of July weekend, the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor detonated vast amounts of media and beltway speculation. Yet the retirement of the US supreme court's first woman justice is not merely a major Washington story. It is also potentially a seismic national political event - at least as important, in its own context, as the election of a president or a new congress.The nine-justice court is so central to the US system of government that any new presidential nomination to it would be important at any time - and with a gap of 11 years since the last one, a generation of would-be justices now impatiently awaits the call. But O'Connor's position as the swing voter on so many crucial decisions in the past decade and a half gives added weight to this moment. It means that the lives of millions of Americans will be shaped for years by her successor's stance on issues such as abortion, race and religion.That, naturally, is why so many on the right see this as an immense opportunity and why so many on the left see it, with equal fervour, as a moment of direst threat. For it has been an open secret ever since Bush became president (thanks in no small part to one of Justice O'Connor's most important swing votes) that many Republican party lobbies have no higher priority than to reshape the court under Antonin Scalia in an aggressively conservative mould - with a view to dismantling the role federal government has played in US life since at least the time of the New Deal. Without an election to face, Bush may share that view.Whether this actually happens may be another matter. Even with the Republicans in charge of both the executive and legislative branches of government, constraints exist. Most Americans are decent and pragmatic people, offended by the right's culture wars, as opinion polls consistently show and as the Terry Schiavo case recently reminded them. So Republican candidates in next year's mid-term elections may be uneasy about the effect of nominating a cultural-warrior judge. Bush will also be under pressure to nominate another woman; he did not get where he is today by ignoring the political middle ground, where O'Connor's cautious pragmatism and resistance to ideological jurisprudence played so well.Time for a general knowledge question. What is the name of Britain's newly appointed lord chief justice, who will take over from Lord Woolf on October 1 as the most important judge in the land? You will not be alone, I think, if you do not immediately call to mind Nicholas Phillips, who as Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers has presided over the court of appeal for the past five years. Nor are you likely to be the only reader not fully aware that Lord Phillips will be succeeded as master of the rolls by Sir Anthony Clarke, nor that Sir Igor Judge - surely the best name on the English bench - will be the new head of the Queen's bench division of the high court.These three major appointments were announced quietly in a press release a couple of weeks ago. The release contained almost no further information about the appointees. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that they received only cursory attention. No newspaper thought the story sufficiently interesting to put it on the front page. Fewer still followed it up. There was no debate among commentators, much less any public controversy, about the kind of questions that might normally apply: whether these were the right men for the top jobs, where they stood on significant legal issues of the day, or where these appointments might take the English courts.This was striking and eloquent, and not only because of the contrast it provides with what has just been unleashed in the United States. These appointments were, after all, the first under the very major changes in the structure of the English courts brought in by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. It might have been expected, therefore, that the appointment of Lord Phillips and his colleagues might have been marked in a way that signalled to the public, however carefully and properly, that they will be key figures in a new constitutional era.In the event, nothing remotely of the sort occurred. The truth is that the most senior appointments in our supposedly reformed judicial system have been made much as they were in the past - unheralded and with a minimum of openness.Fifty million dollars, it is said, will be spent in the battle for Justice O'Connor's seat. With two other justices in their 80s and a third a cancer sufferer, the process may soon be repeated with equal intensity, at even greater expense and with still more epochal consequences for America. From a distance, this can all too easily seem a travesty, even a corruption, of a process for selecting the most senior members of an independent and merit-based judiciary.But at least the American process is one that explicitly and implicitly recognises the centrality of the judges and the law to the constitutional processes of modern democratic government. In this country, with rare and distinguished exceptions such as Lord Woolf, our system is overwhelmingly in denial about such connections. That is what disturbs me about the furtive announcements here last month. If we meekly concede that we have no right to know anything about the highest judges in the land, or no right to call their thinking to public account in any way, then we are vacating a very important part of the public arena.We are rightly urged to foster a culture of respect. But unless we can respect judges, it is harder to respect the law. And unless we respect the law, it is harder to respect the system of government of which the law and the judges are such integral parts.