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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

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Published: February 23, 2020

On 21 February 2020, Dr. Florian Heindler (Sigmund Freud University, Vienna) our team - with special thanks to Erlis Themeli - organized a small scale a seminar on e-justice at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Nine students from Vienna accompanied Dr. Heindler to learn abouy and give presentation on e-justice. Our univeristy was the last one in a series of visits, including to the European Commission and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.

The students presented their research on a wide variety of interesting topics on judicial cooperation and the use of IT, including on the Service and Evidence Regulations and Conventions, liablity in relation to the use of IT international legal cooperation, non-discriminatory access to IT-based judicial infrastructure, and data protection. Some of our ERC members and other staff members of our law school gave a presentation or acted as commentator to the students' presentations.