Civil Litigation In A Globalizing World

Globalization of legal traffic and the inherent necessity of having to litigate in foreign courts or to enforce judgments in other countries considerably complicate civil proceedings due to great differences in civil procedure. This may consequently jeopardize access to justice. This triggers the debate on the need for harmonization of civil procedure. In recent years, this debate has gained in importance because of new legislative and practical developments both at the European and the global level. This book discusses the globalization and harmonization of civil procedure from the angles of legal history, law and economics and (European) policy. Attention is paid to the interaction with private law and private international law, and European and global projects that aim at the harmonization of civil procedure or providing guidelines for fair and efficient adjudication. It further includes contributions that focus on globalization and harmonization of civil procedure from the viewpoint of eight different jurisdictions. This book is an unique combination of theory and practice and valuable for academic researchers in the area of civil procedure, private international law, international law as well as policy makers (national and EU), lawyers, judges and bailiffs.

'International law' is no longer a sufficient rubric to describe the complexities of law in an era of globalization. Accordingly, this collection situates cross-border norm development at the intersection of interdisciplinary scholarship on comparative law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, cyberlaw, legal pluralism and the cultural analysis of law, as well as traditional international law. It provides a broad range of seminal articles on transnational law-making, governmental and non-governmental networks, judicial influence and cooperation across borders, the dialectical relationships among national, international and non-state legal norms, and the possibilities of 'bottom-up' and plural law-making processes. The introduction situates these articles within the framework of law and globalization and suggests four important ways in which such a framework enlarges the traditional focus of international law. This book, therefore, provides a crucial reference for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the varied processes of norm development in the emerging global legal order.

In modern times, the civil procedural laws of every country have been influenced by those of other countries. For instance, the Japanese legal system was itself influenced by Chinese culture and later developed independently under the policy of national isolation. And since 1868, Japan has modernized its civil procedural law, using French, German, and American law as its models. Japan has recently tried to contribute by way of legislative and legal educational assistance to other Asian countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) in civil and procedural law. The civil procedural laws of different countries should be expected to harmonize with each other in the global society. This book is the outcome of the Congress of the International Association of Procedural Law at the Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. In this book, various outstanding contributors are treating a contemporary legal problem in their own civil procedural systems, including examples from India, the Netherlands, Korea, Italy, China, Japan, etc.

The book consists of a selection of papers presented at the Asia-Pacific Research Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities. It contains essays on current legal issues in law and justice, and their role and transformation in a globalizing world. Topics covered include human rights, criminal law, good governance, democracy, foreign investment, and regional integration. The conference focused on Asia and the Pacific, two regions where law has taken an important position in creating and shaping the regional integrations, new legal institutions, and norms. This reconfirms the idea that the legal system is extremely important in the global world. This book provides new insights and new horizons on how law and justice took part in globalizing human interaction, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

This book shows the surprising dynamism of the field of civil procedure through its examination of a cross section of recent developments within civil procedure from around the world. It explores the field through specific approaches to its study, within specific legal systems, and within discrete sub-fields of civil procedure. The book reflects the latest research and conveys the dynamism and innovations of modern civil procedure - by field, method and system. The book’s introductory chapters lay the groundwork for researchers to appreciate the flux and change within the field. The concluding chapters bring the many different identified innovations and developments together to show the field's ability to adapt to modern circumstances, while retaining its coherence even across different legal systems, traditions, fields and analytic approaches. Specifically, in this book the presence of dynamism is explored in the legal systems of the EU, France, the US, Brazil, Australia, the UK and China. So too that dynamism is explored in the contributions’ analyses and discussions of the changes or need for change of specific aspects of civil procedure including litigation costs, class actions, derivative actions, pleadings, and res judicata. Furthermore, most of the individual contributions may be considered to be comparative analyses of their respective subjects and, when considered as a whole, the book presents the dynamism of civil procedure in comparative perspective. Those discrete and aggregated comparative analyses permit us to better understand the dynamism in civil procedure – for change in the abstract can be less visible and its significance and impact less evident. While similar conclusions may have been drawn through examinations in isolation, employing comparative analytic methods provided a richer analysis and any identified need for change is correspondingly advanced through comparative analysis. Furthermore, if that analysis leads to a conclusion that change is necessary then comparative law may provide pertinent examples for such change - as well as methodologies for successfully transplanting any such changes. In other words, as this book so well reflects, comparative law may itself usefully contribute to dynamism in civil procedure. This has long been a raison d'être of comparative law and, as clear from this book’s contributions, in this particular time and field of study we find that it is very likely to achieve its lofty promise.

Based upon empirical research, this work focuses on the structure and culture of cross-border legal interaction. It aims to describe the environment with which actors of cross-border exchanges are confronted and have to cope, and attempts to define the present and future role of domestic courts.