Commercial courts and EU Justice Scoreboard in Dubrovnik
News
Sustaining Access to Justice in Europe: New Avenues for Costs and Funding

The team of the NWO Vici project ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University (Rotterdam), is organising the conference ‘Sustaining Access to Justice in Europe: New Avenues for Costs and Funding’ on 19 and 20 October 2023 at the Erasmus Paviljoen at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Access to civil justice is of paramount importance for enforcing citizens’ rights. At the heart of access to civil justice lies litigation funding and cost management. Yet, over the past decades, access to justice has been increasingly put under pressure due to retrenching governments, high costs of procedure, and the inefficiency of courts and justice systems. Within this context, the funding of litigation in Europe seems to be shifting from public to private sources. Private actors and innovative business models emerged to provide new solutions to the old problem of financial barriers of access to justice.
With the participation of policymakers, practitioners, academics, and civil society representatives from all over Europe and beyond, the conference seeks to delve deeper into the financial implications of access to justice and the different ways to achieve sustainable civil justice systems in Europe.
The topics addressed in this international academic conference will include the different methods of financing dispute resolution, particularly in the context of group litigation (third-party funding, crowdfunding, blockchain technologies), public interest litigation, developments in ADR/ODR, the new business models of legal professionals as well as law and economics aspects on litigation funding. The conference is supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Find the link to registration here.
Please find the preliminary conference programme below.
Call for papers Vici Conference Sustainable justice 2023.pdf
Conference_Programme_2023_(1).pdf (euciviljustice.eu)


Published: June 2, 2022

After three years the annual Public Private Justice course and conference in Dubrovnik resumed in live format (23-27 May 2022). The overriding theme was: The End of Civil Procedure? Challenges of Automatization, Specialization and Privatization. Xandra Kramer gave a presentation entitled ‘Commercializing Litigation: from court specialization to commodification – the case of international business courts’. She discussed how the establishment of international commercial courts - in Europe in part as a response to Brexit - have contributed to commodification of litigation, which has both positive and negative aspects. Adriani Dori prestented on ‘The Role of the EU in the Transformations of EU National Civil Justice Systems’, critically discussing -based on collected empirical data - how the EU Justice scoreboard assesses the civil justice systems, and which recommendations resulted from this assessment.