Professional Ethics of Lawyers and Judges
News
Out now: Financing Collective Actions in The Netherlands
The book Financing Collective Actions in the Netherlands: Towards a Litigation Fund? has just been published (Eleven International Publishing 2024) and is available open access. The book is authored by the Rotterdam Vici team members Xandra Kramer and Jos Hoevenaars, and Ianika Tzankova and Karlijn van Doorn (both TilbUniversity). It is an English and updated version of a Study commissioned by the Dutch Research and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Justice, published in September 2023. It discusses developments in Dutch collective actions from a regulatory perspective, including the implementation of the RAD, and contains a quantitative and qualitative analysis of cases that have been brought under the WAMCA. It examines funding aspects of collective actions from a regulatory, empirical and comparative perspective. It delves into different funding modes, including market developments in third party litigation funding, and addresses the question of the necessity, feasibility, and design of a (revolving) litigation fund for collective actions.
A launch event and webinar will take place on 3 July from 15-17.15 hrs CET. Registration for free here.
Published: July 11, 2022
On 10 and 11 July, Jos Hoevenaars participated as a speaker at the meeting of the RCSL Working Group of the Comparative Study of the Legal Professions (WGLP) which was held from 10 till 12 July in Coimbra, Portugal. The working group brought together eminent researchers working on various aspects surrounding professional ethics of both judges and lawyers. Unable to travel to Portugal Jos joined the panel on legal ethics remotely to present his research on the impact of the (increasing) possibility for parties to litigate without the guidance of a legal aid provider on Dutch civil procedure in practice. Through interviews with Dutch subdistrict judges he analyses the extent to which self-representation influences the role of the judge. The research shows how judges seek a balance between their role as neutral arbitrator in a dispute and a more active role necessitated by parties not being represented by a legal aid provider. In doing so, they navigate between process and content, and must constantly balance the trade-off between acting more actively to gather sufficient information for a substantive handling and assessment of the case, on the one hand, and safeguarding the limits of party autonomy and their own (perceived) neutrality, on the other.