Conference: Courts as an Arena of Societal Change
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
Provisional Programme.pdf
Published: July 12, 2022
Carlota Ucín has participated in the Conference: ‘Courts as an Arena for Societal Change’ that took place on the 8 and 9 July 2022, at Leiden Law School. In her presentation, she developed some ideas from her recent book: Inequality on trials. The defence of social rights through the judicial process (in Spanish). In particular, she focused on the importance of introducing some reforms within the judicial process to legitimate the role of courts in public interest litigation. She presented the idea of the ‘deliberative legitimacy of courts’ that implies the possibility of opening up the dialogue between interested and affected groups through public hearings as well as enforcing the duty of justification of the judges by applying a scheme of argumentation that includes a more sophisticated proportionality test.