Leicester Law School
Dispute Resolution
The Dispute Resolution cluster includes members of staff with a wide range of different interest within the sphere of private, public and mixed dispute resolution, both at the domestic and international level. The cluster offers a setting for debates, runs research workshops and seminars, participate in research networks, integrates the research of various members of staff, postgraduate research students and colleagues from other institutions, hosts international academic visitors and its work is at the foundations of joint-authored books and journal articles in the field of dispute resolution.
News and Events
The digitisation of civil justice in England and Wales: context and conflict, 17 May
Tony N Guise
This talk considers the Government’s approach to reforming the civil, family and tribunal jurisdictions in England and Wales. Those reforms are set in their historical context providing insights as to the work done since 2012 and the work to be completed.
The scale of the Government’s ambition is assessed. This assessment considers the consequences for the progress of the reforms given no jurisdiction in the world has or is planning to digitise the entire dispute resolution journey from before proceedings begin (the Pre-Action phase) to its conclusion, the enforcement phase.
A central theme of the talk is the way in which history and recent management of the reforms threatens to derail completion of work that is essential to ensure the continuing relevance of the justice system in English and Welsh society.
Challenges and opportunities are considered particularly the opportunity that granular data collection offers for empirical reform of civil justice in the future. An approach to reform is proposed guided by the availability of granular data and the learning from the mistakes of the past.
Details
Date and time: Wednesday 17 June 2023, 13:00
Meeting link (expired)
Current research
Masood Ahmed’s research interests lie in the fields of civil procedure and ADR. His research is increasingly focusing upon judicial approaches to ADR and the impact of this on various aspects of the civil justice system. His research on civil procedure led him to be co-opted to a specialist sub-committee of the Civil Procedure Rules Committee to assist it on the implementation of the Jackson Reforms to the General Pre-action Protocol. He has also recently been appointed to evaluate and report on the effectiveness of a novel ADR scheme in resolving professional negligence disputes. His findings and recommendations will be reported to the Ministry of Justice, senior members of the judiciary and the Civil Procedure Rules Committee. Masood has also written on the theoretical and practical aspect of international commercial arbitration and, with Paolo Vargiu, is writing a book on the law and practice of international commercial arbitration for Palgrave Macmillan.
Pablo Cortés is a Professor at Leicester Law School. He is originally from Spain where he obtained his law degree (Vigo); and he continued his education in Ireland with an LLM in European and Comparative Law (Limerick) and a PhD (Cork). He is currently on research leave (2014/16) while completing two projects: a European grant to research on online mediation and a Nuffield grant to evaluate consumer ADR schemes in the EU. Some of the research findings will appear in his forthcoming book: The Law of Consumer Redress in an Evolving Digital Market (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He is also negotiating a book contract for an edited collection on Consumer ADR. Pablo serves on the advisory board of NeutralNet and Youstice. He is also a member of the ODR Taskforce of the International Mediation Institute and a member of the ODR Advisory Group of the Civil Justice Council in the UK. He has been invited to expert meetings and advised the UNCITRAL (WG3), the European Commission (DG SANCO) and (DG JUST), and the European Parliament (IMCO) and (JURI). He is a fellow of the NCTDR (UMass) and in 2012 he was a Gould Research Fellow (Stanford).
Carla Crifò’s interest in civil procedure rules starts with the nature of these rules as part of a legal system’s regulation and prohibition of self-help, and runs through the correlation between general philosophies underpinning specific legal systems, whether national or transnational, and the rules and institutions of adjudication and litigation that are present in those legal systems. Thus, she has studied and written about what is now known as the core of a European law of civil procedure, produced by the EU institutions and to be applied in courts throughout the Union itself; and also compared directly institutions such as default judgment and the reaction to rule non-compliance in various legal systems. Her next projects concern whether the current rules of civil procedure in England are, or should be, abstract rules of general application to any civil subject-matter, and how “user-friendly” they are in practice.
Eki Omorogbe is a lecturer at the University of Leicester. She holds degree from the Universities of Warwick (LLB), London (LLM) and Kent (PhD), and was called to the Bar in Nigeria. Eki ’s research field is African States and Public International Law, and her area is peace and security. She is concerned with re-examining the principle of non-intervention in African states by considering the legitimacy of governments in international law, the use of force including military humanitarian intervention and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, and the jurisdiction of the international criminal courts. The organisations that she has been examining are the United Nations, the African Union, and the International Criminal Court.
Paolo Vargiu is a Lecturer in Law who joined the University of Leicester in 2010. Paolo holds degrees from the Universities of Cagliari, Italy (JD), Nottingham (LLM, PhD) and Leicester (PGCHE); he is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a practicing member of the Italian Bar. Paolo’s research interests lie in the field of international investment law, with particular attention to investment arbitration and the review of arbitral awards. Paolo is also an active researcher in the field of international commercial arbitration, and together with Masood Ahmed will publish a handbook on the Law and Practice of International Commercial Arbitration in 2016 for Palgrave Macmillan.