Torrens, Robert (1774–1856), judge, was born 14 October 1774, near Dungiven, Co. Londonderry, second son of the Rev. Thomas Torrens (1741–c.1780) of Londonderry and his wife Elizabeth (d. early 1780s), daughter of Sir Samuel Curry. It is likely that he accompanied his younger brother, Henry Torrens (qv), into the care of the family of his father's cousin, Rev. Thomas Torrens, of Ballynascreen, Co. Londonderry, after the early death of his parents. The household moved to Dublin about 1786, when his putative guardian was made archdeacon of Dublin. Tutored to matriculation by a Mr Marshall, he entered TCD (3 January 1791), took a scholarship (1793), and graduated BA (spring 1795). Entering King's Inns in 1796, he was called to the Irish bar (1798) and built up a steady practice.
By 1817 Torrens had been raised to KC, acted as chairman of quarter sessions in Co. Dublin, and served as counsel to the barrack board. In 1818 he was elected a bencher of King's Inns. As he was thus one of the forty-five governing members of the Irish legal profession, his income was henceforth increased by a proportion of the annual student fees. Conducting the prosecution of many of the cases at the Limerick commission of January–March 1822, taken by the crown under the insurrection act (3 Geo. IV, c. 1), he was paid ten guineas daily for fifty-three days in court. Though it seems he formally became third serjeant-at-law on 13 May 1822, he presided in the capacity of ‘serjeant’ for several weeks at the Cork commission of March–April 1822. Daniel O'Connell (qv) felt that his judicial performance at the commission was too aggressive, but it earned him a letter of gratitude from the lord lieutenant, Richard, 1st Marquis Wellesley (qv). Together with the personal influence exercised at the court of George IV by his brother, now Sir Henry Torrens, this was sufficient to have him appointed justice of the common pleas on 10 July 1823. Although contemporaries felt that his abilities were mediocre, he made no serious errors while on the bench – ‘he took common-sense views of the questions and rarely ventured beyond his depth’ (Freeman's Journal, 1 Apr. 1856).
On the Munster circuit from March 1824, he was appointed in October 1828 with Baron Richard Pennefather (qv) to the special commission established in Cork city to try twenty-one Doneraile men charged with conspiracy to murder three local magistrates. Taking a junior role in the shared supervision of this controversial trial, he was officious and pedantic, refusing on 26 October 1828 a defence application to adjourn proceedings to give time for O'Connell to get to court from Derrynane, with the tart rejoinder that ‘it was the business of the court to prevent delay and defeat artifice’ (O'Flanagan, 327). The conviction of four men at the first court sitting (23 October 1828) was popularly seen as a flagrant miscarriage of justice. Though O'Connell thought Torrens ‘quiet and gentlemanly’ in 1824 (O'Connell, Corr., iii, 11), he accounted him a ‘narrow-minded inveterate Orangeist’ by late 1843 (ibid., v, 179): the two views are perhaps not incompatible.
Indeed, by the second decade of his judicial career Torrens was said to have become noticeably more merciful and painstaking in capital cases at assize. In April 1841 he dissented from the majority view when a benchers’ committee advised the King's Inns to make a small annual contribution to the Law Institute in Dublin. In 1850 he voted against setting up a school of law in the King's Inns. By the late 1840s and early 1850s he had made a habit of not going on circuit because of fatigue or sickness, and he was one of those embarrassed in May 1855 by criticisms in the commons and in the Law Times that nearly half the members of the Irish bench were too old or frail to discharge their duties. Rallying at the spring assizes of 1856, he turned in a good performance on the north-west circuit, and was gratified by the address of the several grand juries in his honour. However, after a brief illness, he died 29 March 1856 at Derrynard Lodge, near Dungiven.
He married (1809) his second cousin, Anne Torrens (d. 1832) of Londonderry; they had two daughters and three sons. Their daughter Henrietta Torrens (1818–57) was the first wife of the Rev. William Chichester O'Neill (qv), 1st Baron O'Neill of Shane Castle.