Seminar series EU Civil Justice
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 19, 2021
The ERC Building EUCivil Justice team organized a series of six seminars between May and July2021. The series covered a variety of topics in the field of European civil justice and zoom in on the key topics our group has been working on over the past four years. These include the privatization and digitalization of civil justice, cross-border judicial co-operation, international business courts, and self-representation. Each session brought together invited speakers and our own researchers. The webinars gathered between 25 to 85 participants from all over the world per session and resulted in lively and fruitful debates, despite the online format.
The first seminar, organized by Betül Kas, was dedicated to The Role of Out-of-Court Justice in the European Enforcement Regime, discussing among others the role of Article 47 TFEU and the process of obtaining remedies in the Volkswagen diesel case. During the second seminar, organised by Erlis Themeli, the discussion zoomed in on Modernising European Cross-Border Judicial Collaboration, including an ongoing digitization project of the European Commission, the Dutch participation in e-Codex and digitisation in the context of uniform European procedures. The third seminar was organised by Emma van Gelder, and was dedicated to Digital Constitutionalism and European Digital Policies and discussed remedies in the context of European policies, the role of private platforms and judicial review. The fourth seminar, organized by Jos Hoevenaars, dealt with the topic Representing Future Generations: Private Law aspects of Climate Change Litigation. Making the shift from self-representation under the ERC project to the representation of present and future generations it discussed different aspects of recent climate change litigation, with a focus on the recent Dutch Shell case. The fifth seminar by Georgia Antonopoulou was dedicated to the Arbitralization of Courts, and discussed how recently established international business courts copy features of arbitration and what the limits are. The sixth and last seminar entitled European Civil Justice in Transition: Past, Present & Future, moderated by Xandra Kramer and Alexandre Biard concluded the series. The speakers addressed the upcoming revision of the Brussels I-bis Regulation, digitisation and the development of integrated dispute resolution, trust and quality in civil justice and the future of civil justice.