BASF's Appellate Law Section is holding a roundtable discussion with 9th Cir. Judge Daniel Bress on Wednesday, Sept. 29, noon to 1. Register here.
The Wall St. Journal has Italy Tries to Fix a Chronic Problem: Slow Courts, noting:
- Italy’s justice system is famously one of the slowest in the developed world. Even simple contractual disputes can take years to resolve.
- Getting a verdict from a court of first instance in civil or commercial litigation takes more than 500 days in Italy, compared with 217 days in Germany, according to European Union estimates. Appealing a ruling in Italy takes even longer: an average of 800 days for a first appeal and 1,300 for a second appeal to Italy’s supreme court.
- Lawyers and judges say a combination of lack of resources and well-trained personnel, red tape, lack of digitization and excessively easy and widespread recourse to courts to settle civil disputes have led to an unmanageable backlog of cases.
- proposed overhauls ... would set strict limits on the duration of appeals in criminal cases, after which courts must drop the case. The changes would also incentivize the use of arbitration and other out-of-court settlements to keep civil cases away from courtrooms. New rules would also make it more difficult to appeal a first-instance ruling, to rein in a widespread habit that clogs up appeals courts.
PJ Gilbert's Under Submission column is Real to Reel about "Real to Reel, Truth and Trickery in Courtroom Movies," by Professors Paul Bergman and Michael Asimow (Vandeplas Publishing, May 2021). In a somewhat related column, Joanna Storey of Hinshaw & Culberson has Legal ethics lessons learned from TV lawyers.
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