Seminar Series Trends and Challenges in Costs and Funding of Civil Justice - Second Seminar
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: January 10, 2022
From December 2021 – June 2022, the team of the Vici project ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ at Erasmus School of Law organizes an online seminar series dedicated to Trends and Challenges in Costs and Funding of Civil Justice.
The second seminar was dedicated to Legal Mobilization: A European Perspective, and took place on 19 January 2022, 15-17 CET. This discussed recent scholarship on legal mobilization at the Pan-European level in the context of EU Migration Law, EU Data Protection Law, and European Human Rights Law.
Lisa Harms (University of Münster) presented on Human rights advocacy and the transnational regulation of religion: The case of Muslim legal mobilization. She focused on the case of Muslim legal mobilization at the ECtHR and present quantitative data collected regarding the legal mobilization of religious groups at the ECtHR as well as in-depth interviews conducted with litigants and their supporters.
Virginia Passalacqua (Utrecht University) presented on Legal mobilization via preliminary references: the case of migrant rights. She discussed how the EU Court of Justice became a central venue for migrant rights defenders that increasingly rely on the preliminary reference procedure to challenge national anti-migration policies. However, legal mobilization varies greatly among Member States: some countries make multiple references and others make none. Virginia Passalacqua’s presentation will shed light on the factors that facilitate or hamper legal mobilization for migrant rights before the EU Court.
Sanja Badanjak (University of Edinburgh)prestented on Constitutional review as an opportunity structure for legal mobilization in the EU. She addressed how constitutional complaints offer routes through which citizens’ mobilization in defence of their rights may be realized. In the EU, this can be used to voice opposition and change EU law via the preliminary reference procedure. However, this also requires further consideration of cross-country variation in citizens’ access to constitutional litigation.