Seminar Series Trends and Challenges in Costs and Funding of Civil Justice - First Seminar
News
Jos Hoevenaars joins Vici ‘Affordable Justice’ team

On 1 November 2023, Jos Hoevenaars re-joined Erasmus School of Law after completing a one-year research project at the Dutch Council for the Judiciary which focused on questions of effectiveness of judgments in the Dutch legal system (report available early 2024). Previously, he was part of our ERC ‘Building EU civil justice’ team, where his research focused mainly on (self)representation in court and access to justice in a cross-border context. In 2022, he was the executive project manager for a study commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security and its Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) that looked into the usefulness and necessity of a litigation fund for collective actions in the Netherlands (Dutch report available here, English book forthcoming).
The coming years he will strengthen the Vici ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ team, focusing on costs and funding of collective actions, and he will develop a new line of research in the area of strategic litigation in which he will investigate the collective and representative action field from a legal mobilisation perspective. He will also play a role in the setting up of a European Civil Justice Centre.


Published: November 30, 2021
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.
First session: Access to Justice and Costs and Funding of Civil Litigation
On 15 December 2021, the series kicked off with a general session that will address several topics of access to justice and costs and funding, including collective redress and costs reforms, and presented a present a Law & Economics perspective.This first session was combined with the launch of the book New Pathways to Civil Justice in Europe (Springer, 2021) that resulted from an earlier conference organized by the ERC project team.
Judith Resnik (Yale University) who authored the concluding chapter (available open access), among others, discussed the question from which perspective to understand the civil legal system so as to make judgments about whether a system is just or unjust.
Ianika Tzankova (Tilburg University) focused on access to justice against the background of trends in global dispute resolution where big players are shaping the future, and the funding of litigation.
John Sorabji (University College London) zoomed in on developments in costs and funding of civil justice, including the move to recoverable fees, the upcoming review of the Jackson costs reform and funding of representative actions.
Louis Visscher (Erasmus School of Law) presented a Law & Economics perspective on costs and funding, including rational apathy, risk aversion and agency problems.
The seminar was introduced and moderated by Xandra Kramer, PI of the Vici and ERC projects at Erasmus School of Law.