Charles Osborne (politician)

His political opponents said that his appointment was entirely due to his support for the Union, and that he lacked the requisite legal ability to be fit for judicial office.

Despite his successful career in the House of Commons he seems to have been a curiously obscure figure: Elrington Ball goes so far as to suggest that most barristers had never heard of him at the time of his elevation to the Bench, despite his having served as Revenue counsel since 1793.

On the other hand, Ball thought that his Parliamentary career gave him a wider experience of public life than some of his judicial colleagues.

In 1814 Osborne was one of the judges at the trial of the publisher John Magee on a charge of seditious libel.

Osborne also sat as one of the judges in the leading quo warranto case of Rex v O'Grady in 1816.