TY - JOUR
AU - Woolf, Lord Harry
AB - AbstractIn 1994, Lord Harry Woolf, then a member of the House of Lords, and now Master of the Rolls, was appointed by the Lord Chancellor to review the current rules and procedures of the civil courts in England and Wales. Lord Woolf issued an Interim Report in June 1995 setting out the problems with civil litigation in England and Wales, and laying out an agenda for reform. When the Florence conference was held at the end of May 1996, Lord Woolf was in the process of editing the Final Report, entitled Access to Justice, which was published in July 1996. We present here slightly edited versions of Lord Woolf’s appraisal of the problems of civil litigation in England set out in Chapter 3 of the Interim Report, and of the Overview of the recommendations set out in the Final Report, designed, as he put it, to create a fundamentally different landscape of civil litigation.Lord Woolf’s characterization of the problems will surprise those, especially in the United States and Canada, who have long looked to English litigation as a model to which they would aspire. Who would have expected, for example, the statement in paragraph 28 of Lord Woolf s Interim Report that a leading international bank was considering a move from London to New York for resolving legal disputes, in order to save on legal expenses?The solutions recommended resemble, in many ways, the recommendations made by many participants in the symposium, both from civil law and from common law systems. Two sets of recommendations, however, will surprise those who have regarded the English system as the pillar of the adversary system directed by the lawyers: Lord Woolf recommends active case management by judges, and he recommends the use, when possible, of single experts reporting to the court as is usual in civil law countries, in place of the battle of party-nominated experts familiar in common law courts. Excerpts from the chapters of the Final Report treating these topics follow the Overview.
TI - Civil Justice in the United Kingdom
JF - American Journal of Comparative Law
DO - 10.2307/841013
DA - 1997-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/civil-justice-in-the-united-kingdom-wkqs0L2goX
SP - 709
EP - 736
VL - 45
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -