Project Description

CPLJ was envisaged as a comprehensive study of comparative civil procedural law and civil dispute resolution schemes in the contemporary world. It aimed at understanding procedural rules in their cultural context, as well as at highlighting workable approaches to the resolution of civil disputes. It focused on recent developments in the field of comparative civil procedure from a global perspective. These included the influence of Information Technologies and Artificial Intelligence; the expansion of alternative dispute resolution; the most recent trends on access to justice; the challenges of collective litigation; and the growing needs for transparency and independence of the justice systems. The cultural dimensions and the methodology of comparative civil procedural law received specific attention.

The ultimate goal of the project was to produce a multi-volume Publication on Comparative Procedural Law and Justice accessible online. The Publication, to be released in full in autumn 2024, is expected to illustrate the consolidation of comparative civil procedural law as a self-standing research area and aspires to become one of the main sources of reference for future studies.

Participants

More than one hundred scholars from all over the world were actively involved in CPLJ. They were guided by a Board of General Editors, composed of Burkhard Hess, Margaret Woo, Loïc Cadiet, Séverine Menétrey and Enrique Vallines. They were supported by a Scientific Advisory Board of twelve distinguished professors: Oscar Chase, Vivian Curran, Hazel Genn, John Haley, Moon-Hyuck Ho, Eduardo Oteiza, Fausto Pocar, Paul-Gérard Pougoué, Judith Resnik, Rolf Stürner, Maciej Szpunar and Janet Walker. Participants were organized into orignally eighteen teams of authors from which sixteen parts evolved. Every team was led by a coordinator, always a distinguished professor affiliated to a prestigious university or research institution. Some teams also enjoyed the collaboration of ‘correspondents’, ie, legal scholars or practitioners who did not participate as authors but contributed with information about their national legal systems. Finally, several researchers of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg were supporting the teams; some of them also participated as authors. Overall, the team members came from different jurisdictions, in order to facilitate a global perspective.

Parts

Every team of authors was responsible for a thematic part. Particularly, the thematic parts and the teams responsible for them were the following:

Part 1: Introduction

Burkhard Hess, Margaret Woo, Loïc Cadiet, Séverine Menétrey and Enrique Vallines (editors), Marie-Claire Foblets.

Part 2: Organization of the Civil Justice System and Judicial Independence

Eduardo Oteiza (Coordinator), Yulin Fu, John Sorabji, Alan Uzelac, Hermes Zaneti Jr. With collaboration of Inga Jarvekulg.

Part 3: Access to Justice and Costs of Litigation

Wolfgang Hau (Coordinator), Petra Butler, Shusuke Kakiuchi, Ramon Feldbrin, Séverine Menétrey, María Luisa Villamarín López. With collaboration of Anastasia Trubacheva.

Part 4: Constitutionalization and Fundamentalization of Civil Procedural Guarantees and Principles

Frédérique Ferrand and Beate Gsell (Coordinators), Sergio Cruz Arenhart, Tanja Domej, Jordi Nieva Fenoll, Younghwa Moon, Magdalena Tulibacka. With collaboration of Konstantin Branovitskii and Giovanni Chiapponi.

Part 5: Jurisdiction and Venue of the Court

Peter C.H. Chan (Coordinator), Scott Dodson, Kamalia Mehtiyeva, Mohamed Paleker, Giovanni Priori Posada, Caterina Silvestri. With collaboration of Marco de Cristofaro, Felix Koechel and Marco Buzzoni.

Part 6: Structure of Civil Litigation

Stefan Huber (Coordinator), Kangnikoé Bado, Aleš Galič, Aluisio Gonçalves de Castro Mendes, Linda S. Mullenix, Anna Nylund, Enrique Vallines, Janek Nowak. With collaboration of Shiro Kawashima and Majid Pourostad.

Part 7: Access to Information. Evidence

Richard Marcus (Coordinator), Talia Einhorn, Leandro Giannini, Kiochi Miki, Michael Stürner, Leon Marcel Kahl.

Part 8: Final Judgment, Appeals and Review

Luca Passanante (Coordinator), Carlo Vittorio Giabardo, Viktória Harsági, Yin Jin, Gerard Kennedy, Daniel Mitidiero. With collaboration of Christoph Kern, Piotr Rylski, Wendy Perdue, Philippos Siaplaouras and Hannah Deters.

Part 9: Digital Revolution and Procedure

Fernando Gascón Inchausti (Coordinator), Karim Benyekhlef, Paolo Comoglio, Aera Han, Björn Laukemann, Magne Strandberg. With collaboration of Giorgia Spolverato.

Part 10: Collective Litigation

Teresa Arruda Alvim (Coordinator), Alexandre Biard, Theo Broodryk, Deborah Hensler, Elisabetta Silvestri, Stefaan Voet, Francisco Verbic. With collaboration of Priyanka Jain.

Part 11: Special Forms of Procedures

Soraya Amrani Mekki (Coordinator), Wei-Yu Chen, Maryellen Fullerton, Xandra Kramer, Guillermo Ormazabal Sánchez, Fernanda Medina Pantoja, Vincent Richard. With collaboration of Walter Bruno.

Part 12: Special Subject Matters

María-José Azar-Baud, Wannes Vandenbussche and Catherine Piché (Coordinators), Stephanie Law, Volker Lipp, Kuan-Ling Shen, Piet Taelman, Lena Hornkohl. With collaboration of Irena Ryšánková and Marlene Brosch.

Part 13: Enforcement

Masahisa Deguchi (Coordinator), Wendy Kennett, Rudy Laher, Michele Angelo Lupoi, Álvaro Pérez Ragone. With collaboration of Hector Zhixun Cao and Carlos Santaló Goris.

Part 14: Cross-border and International Dimensions

Geneviève Saumier (Coordinator), Gilles Cuniberti, Burkhard Hess, Justin Monsenepwo, Maciej Szpunar, Krysztof Pacula, Louise Ellen Teitz and Marta Requejo Isidro.

Part 15: Consensual Dispute Resolution and Arbitration

Antonio Cabral and Remo Caponi (Coordinators), Nadja Alexander, Shahla Ali, Helena Soleto Muñoz, Felix Steffek and Jorge A. Rojas. With collaboration of Habiba Abubaker, Serhii Kravtsov, Martina Mantovani and Stavroula Angoura.

Part 16: Outlook

Burkhard Hess, Margaret Woo, Loïc Cadiet, Séverine Menétrey and Enrique Vallines (editors).

Working Together

To prepare the different volumes of the Publication, the teams discussed regularly online. First, every team prepared a general outline of its respective thematic part. The outlines were presented in the online Kick-off Conference between 19 February and 5 March 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. After that, the teams developed the outline and prepared several chapters. The preliminary results were presented in March 2023, in an onsite Mid-term Conference that took place at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg, where almost ninety CPLJ participants gathered in person.

In addition, nine webinars, with seventeen speakers were organized between 2020 and 2022. These webinars dealt with methodological and interdisciplinary approaches, thereby providing valuable scientific inputs to CPLJ. Furthermore, the “CPLJ Lecture Series New trends in procedural law: the comparative approach”, was also organized, with additional support of the Luxembourg Research Fund (FNR - RESCOM/2022/LE/17576191). Nine experts delivered onsite lectures covering four overarching topics, namely (i) the influence of comparative law in procedural reforms at the national level, (ii) the apparent convergence between civil law and common law jurisdictions; (iii) the seeming importance, at least at the national level, of adapting procedural rules to the specific subject-matter of the dispute; and (iv) the growing relevance of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Mechanisms.

The videos of the conferences, webinars and lectures were made available on the MS Teams Platform of the project (restricted to CPLJ participants); some videos were also made available on the YouTube channel of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg.

The Final Conference of CPLJ took place in Luxembourg on 11 and 12 July 2024. The Publication has been launched as an open-access online publication here.

About IAPL

The International Association of Procedural Law (IAPL) was founded in 1950 and currently has more than 500 members worldwide, all experts in civil justice, many of whom have contributed as authors to the CPLJ project.

For further details, see http://www.iaplaw.org/index.php/en/.