INTRODUCTION

The International Association of Procedural Law, chaired by Professor Loïc Cadiet, will host the XVI World Congress in Kobe, Japan. This year the general topic of the event is “Challenges for Civil Justice as We Move Beyond Globalization and Technological Change.” The local organization will be led by Professor Koichi Miki. Among the many interesting subjects that will be addressed, we will, along with Professor Yulin Fu (who will deal with the problem from the perspective of Eastern countries), address the issue of accountability and transparency of civil justice in Western countries.

In order to do so, our study included national reports from Germany (written by Christoph Kern, Johannes Kist, and David Carnal), Argentina (Maria Victoria Mosmann), Brazil (Luiz Guilherme Marinoni and Sérgio Cruz Arenhart), Canada (Gerard Kennedy), Scandinavia (Anna Nylund), Spain (Enrique Vallines-García), the United States (Scott Dodson), France (Soraya Amrani Mekki), England (John Sorabji), Italy (Luca Passanante), and Portugal (Paula Costa e Silva). We thank in advance for the fundamental collaboration and partnership of all colleagues and in this endeavor.

The professors who accepted our invitation wrote essays addressing the following issues – all of which proposed by our Association: i) external and internal judicial independence; ii) form of judgments and legal reasoning of judicial decisions; iii) transparency of civil justice in relation to the use of new technologies procedural information and communication; iv) third-party evaluation and ranking of civil justice. As we can see, all these matters refer, in different ways, to the way in which civil justice reflects and concretizes the basic foundations of the democratic rule of law: without independence, impartiality and legal reasoning, there is no way to promote and assess the relationship between judges and the law, whereas without transparency and publicity, the control over judicial acts by the participants to the proceedings and by society in general would be impossible to obtain. Lastly, the evaluation of civil justice by its consumers represents the public perception of its results, which is important for the creation of an environment of institutional improvement, mutual trust and social development.