[Archelaos]

Although the German constition ("Grundgesetz") states that the judges are independent and only subject to the law,[1] there is a mild pressure towards a consistent interpretation of the law, so that early decisions set the path for later ones. For judges who want to make a career, a certain conformity with the ruling of the appeal court might be useful. But if a judge does not care, there is nothing that can be done as long as he is not excessively deviating from the law ("Rechtsbeugung").

The most prominent example in more or less recent times is also from Hamburg: Ronald Schill, nicknamed "judge without mercy" for his harsh sentences, who was a judge at an Amtsgericht (the lowest level of ordinary jurisdiction) in Hamburg from 1993 to 2001. He then went into politics for a right-wing law-and-order party he founded, that prospered for a short period of time in Hamburg that even entered into a coalition government with the CDU and made him second mayor and senator of the interior of Hamburg.[2]

[1] Art. 97 GG. [2] The Wikipedia article about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Schill contains some hair-raising details about his views and actions.