Professional Ethics of Lawyers and Judges
News
Webinar: Law in Public Interest: Collective Redress, Funding & Climate Regulation
Our Vici team organises an online seminar titled ‘Law in the Public Interest: Collective Redress, and Litigation Funding and Climate Change Regulation’ on 19 November from 15-17 hrs (CET).
The event will explore the intersections between legal frameworks and the public interest in a time of increasing concerns about climate change, corporate responsibility, and the cost barriers to pursuing collective justice. As climate change becomes a global priority, regulatory frameworks and climate litigation are holding governments and corporations accountable for their environmental impact. Collective redress and litigation funding also fulfil this role and are gaining prominence in recent years with the adoption of legislation such as the EU Representative Actions Directive and the Dutch WAMCA and with high-profile cases like the Post Office litigation in the UK.
Esteemed speakers are: Eva van der Zee (University of Hamburg, Germany) on Behavioural Insights on Climate Change Law; Koen Rutten (Finch, Netherlands) on Is Funding Collective Litigation still Affordable? and Flora Page (23ES, United Kingdom) on What the Bates v Post Office Litigation reveals about the Pros and Cons of Litigation Funding. Introduction and moderation by Adrian Cordina and Xandra Kramer
Register before 19 November for free here.
Published: July 11, 2022
On 10 and 11 July, Jos Hoevenaars participated as a speaker at the meeting of the RCSL Working Group of the Comparative Study of the Legal Professions (WGLP) which was held from 10 till 12 July in Coimbra, Portugal. The working group brought together eminent researchers working on various aspects surrounding professional ethics of both judges and lawyers. Unable to travel to Portugal Jos joined the panel on legal ethics remotely to present his research on the impact of the (increasing) possibility for parties to litigate without the guidance of a legal aid provider on Dutch civil procedure in practice. Through interviews with Dutch subdistrict judges he analyses the extent to which self-representation influences the role of the judge. The research shows how judges seek a balance between their role as neutral arbitrator in a dispute and a more active role necessitated by parties not being represented by a legal aid provider. In doing so, they navigate between process and content, and must constantly balance the trade-off between acting more actively to gather sufficient information for a substantive handling and assessment of the case, on the one hand, and safeguarding the limits of party autonomy and their own (perceived) neutrality, on the other.