English Litigation Research Articles

Rethinking dispute resolution mechanisms for Islamic finance: understanding litigation and arbitration in context

While there seems to be a growing appetite for Islamic finance products at a global level, the parties using these products do not seem to pay enough attention to how best they can resolve any disputes arising from these agreements. It is a shortfall that undermines the Islamic compliance aspect of these transactions and jeopardises their unique Islamic characteristic. This article considers ways in which English litigation can be used as an optimal mechanism to resolve Islamic finance disputes. The article particularly analyses the incorporation of international Sharia Standards in Islamic finance agreements as a way to overcome the disadvantages of ligation highlighted by a large body of case law in this context. It then argues that, while arbitration might seem on the face of it a more appropriate mechanism, it is riddled with complexities and disadvantages.

Holding Multinationals to account: recent developments in English litigation and the Company Law Review I

The author explores questions of how and to what extent multinational enterprises (MNEs) should be subject to specialised regulation through laws and rules relating to their activities as cross-border corporate groups – looking in particular at the responsibilities of parent companies for the acts of their overseas subsidiaries. Part one of a two-part article by P.T. Muchlinski (Professor of Law and International Business, Kent Law School, University of Kent at Canterbury) based on a Company Lawyer Lecture given by the author at the IALS on 12 th November 2001. Published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.

Holding Multinationals to account: recent developments in English litigation and the Company Law Review II

Holding Multinationals to account: recent developments in English litigation and the Company Law Review II

Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts (review)

Reviewed by: Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts Kirsi Salonen Donahue, Charles Jr. — Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 672. Charles Donahue Jr.'s book Law Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages is, in the author's own words, "a study of marriage litigation . . . in the archiepiscopal court of York and the Episcopal courts of Ely, Paris, Cambrai, and Brussels." But the book goes far beyond the Harvard professor of law's modest description of his lifelong research. Starting in the 1960s when he became interested in the marital legislation of Pope Alexander III (1159-1181), Donahue has built a brilliant career in studying and explaining mediaeval society through marriage laws. The present book summarizes the results of his research in the field. The study begins with a chapter describing the book's main themes: the laws defining marriage in the Middle Ages, the problematical points (and possible loopholes) in ecclesiastical marriage legislation, and the kinds of cases brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The author thus ties the institution of marriage into a broader concept of networking in the surrounding society. The second chapter is introductory as well, in the sense that it gives — through four well-documented English litigation cases — an idea of the litigants and their strategies before the courts. In the following seven chapters (chap. 3-9), Donahue carefully presents all the information he has gathered from court records during decades of research. He [End Page 477] compares cases to find similarities and dissimilarities between the different territories that are his focus. He handles the information from each court separately, starting with York (chap. 3-5), then Ely (chap. 6), Paris (chap. 7), and finally Cambrai and Brussels (chap. 8-9). He begins each section with a statistical analysis that he compares with the previous findings, then discusses the material in further detail. This is not an easy task, since the content and form of the surviving source corpuses from the five courts are so different from each other. Donahue succeeds, however, in his task of taming the ecclesiastical records sufficiently to be able to juxtapose them in an intelligible comparison. In chapters 10 and 11, the author discusses two additional problematic areas of marriage litigation, namely divorce/separation and incest. Here, too, he succeeds in finding similarities and differences in the patterns he explores, this time almost without statistic analysis. Donahue concludes the book with an Epilogue (chap. 12), which demonstrates how the variety of source material points towards two different social models: English and Franco-Belgian. He argues that these different models formed as a result of territorial variances in local legislation in matters such as marriage, property, and inheritance. He also considers rural-urban variations, as well as the court practices (office cases versus instance cases) to be causes of regional differences. At the end of this chapter, Donahue contextualizes his discoveries by comparing them with the results of the Spanish and German researchers — and, especially, very recent Italian scholarship — and concludes that different marital patterns can be detected in various parts of Christendom, but that there is still very much work to be done before we can fully explain them. In the Epilogue he returns to his scholarly roots and absolves Pope Alexander III from having caused all this trouble through his marital legislation. Donahue demonstrates with this study how one person can master a vast amount of material from five different ecclesiastical courts (York, Ely, Paris, Cambrai, and Brussels) in three different countries (England, Belgium, and France), ranging from 1300 to 1500. He has made the archival material speak through both statistics and lively case studies. The inclusion of statistics in numerous tables enables the reader to see varying patterns in local courts and to place the results in the context of late mediaeval history. The case studies illustrate a qualitative, human point of view, which in too many scholarly books is overshadowed by statistics and patterns. Donahue's examples are not just isolated case studies, but highlight the litigants' (futile or desperate) motives and their...

Civil Justice in the United Kingdom

In 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 Woolfs 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 Woolfs 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 Woolfs 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. ed.