Arbitration is an important feature of the American justice system, providing numerous benefits, such as flexible dispute resolution, efficiency, privacy and avoidance of unwarranted punitive damages, while significantly reducing cases on overloaded court dockets. Its success, however, is not without criticism; and in the case of class arbitration waivers, as this article suggests, that criticism is well founded.
Since the enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in 1925, the United States Supreme Court has pronounced a sweeping policy in favour of arbitration. More recently, the Court has made significant pronouncements in favour of class arbitration waivers, overruling a lower-court trend towards refusing to enforce such waivers.
The Supreme Court’s endorsement of class arbitration waivers unfortunately results in claim preclusion of consumer claims for relatively small amounts of money. Stuck in this relatively inequitable playing field, there exists an opportunity to design innovative solutions to protect consumers from claim preclusion. Online binding arbitration, OArb, offers numerous benefits that offset its drawbacks, and it provides an accessible forum for some consumers to effectuate small claims. While OArb has failed to gain traction as an alternative dispute resolution process, it seems likely that a private, properly administered OArb programme could succeed and provide benefits to companies and consumers alike. OArb, however, is not a complete substitute for class arbitration, especially because numerous consumers are probably unaware of their claims. OArb, nevertheless, is a step in the right direction, and consumers are sure to benefit if it is implemented on a wider scale.

This article captures current trends in online dispute resolution (ODR) and its potential use in Ireland by analysing Irish practitioners’ current attitudes to and awareness of ODR. Ultimately, this work provides the groundwork for future research into Ireland’s use of ODR. This exploratory research will hopefully guide researchers in understanding ODR’s users and consumption.
Data collection came from an online questionnaire sent to conflict intervention practitioners in Ireland who reported their experiences and perspectives of ODR. One hundred and twenty-four surveys were used in this analysis. These questionnaires produced both quantitative and qualitative data. Approximately 900 people were asked to complete the survey.
The author found that surveyed participants were sceptical regarding ODR, with very few actually using online technologies to aid in resolving disputes. A popular sentiment among participating practitioners was that ODR was not better than face-to-face meetings, but that it was worth exploring further. Finally, the author found that those who had heard of ODR are more likely to believe they could assist parties in reaching a final settlement by using video technology.

There is a close link between the growth of Internet usage, the development of mobile technology, the expansion of markets and the increasing number of online dispute resolution mechanisms (ODRs). This article seeks to start a conversation about the need to provide justice by means of effective mechanisms, in particular for e-commerce disputes and transnational litigation. It also provides some information on the recent international initiatives towards the regulation of this new arena, and concludes with an early approach to the future challenges and the impact on training, qualifications and expertise of ODR professionals and service providers.

The present article aims to introduce an innovative educational reform launched by the University of Szeged Faculty of Law. The e-learning initiative of the Szeged Law School offers a chance for both students and lecturers to set aside the traditional Prussian method of education used by the Hungarian professors. Such initiative might, however, have broader implications as well. As such, it can clearly help internationalizing legal education in Hungary and in its neighbouring countries, as well as serve as a great example for other international projects, like online dispute resolution programmes.

The aim of this article is to examine how the structure of legislation can nurture accessibility and effectiveness of legislation.
It explores whether the legislative drafter in carrying out the task of drafting can nurture effective communication of the policy maker’s intent to the targeted audience by making use of the structure of legislation as a tool, to ensure the legislation is accessible to the end user, and foster effectiveness.
The third and fourth stage of Thornton’s stages of the drafting process – design and composition – would be examined and also Peter Butt’s types of structure, which relates to the drafting of legal documents but would be applied in this paper, to the drafting of legislation.

Anti-corruption is a relatively recent policy which calls for controls. They represent the most effective means in rebalancing institutions which are not fully informed: ‘secrecy’, in fact, characterizes infringements and corrupt behaviour.
Alongside criminal investigation, administrative controls and administrative investigation should be considered crucial because they intervene at early stages, when corruption has been developing, allowing real prevention.
This article analyses some points that we should remember in order to connect controls and corruption correctly: first of all, controls have a hybrid nature: not only are they a way to combat or prevent corruption but also they are real occasions for corrupt transactions; furthermore, controls are a cost and administrative capacity of control is limited; moreover, planning controls is not a simple task; and finally, sanctions following controls must be effective in order to deter.
The article also analyzes what is needed in matters of corruption controls, with special reference to good rules (aiming at a legal system with fewer but better rules, rules which work as incentives, rules capable of designing good institutions). There is also a need for good practices (in order to improve the understanding of corruption processes, to reduce controls, to cooperate in investigating cases of corruption).
Finally, the article warns about the fact that corruption controls produce more bureaucracy and that early detection of corruption would mean, in this perspective, to make a diagnosis of ‘corruptibility’ starting from rules.

Custody is the most expensive method of punishment in the Western world, as compared to other alternatives. Although expensive, prison is an indispensible instrument to deal with judgement proof or dangerous offenders. Hence, by using the law and economics approach, this article explores prison privatization as an instrument for less expensive incarceration. This method has the potential to reduce the prison costs without hampering its quality. However, a restructuring of the current contracts is needed to achieve this purpose. The attention given to the topic of private prisons by the law and economics scholars, especially in the European context, is limited, and this article attempts to fill this gap. The present article applies arguments from the bureaucracy and political science literature to explain the inefficiencies of public prisons. Subsequently, the potential problems of private prisons are presented through the principle-agent model and solutions are offered.

The Kenyan Situation pending before the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first situation in which the prosecutor exercised his power to initiate cases “proprio motu” under Article 15 of the Rome Statute. In the wake of the comments from the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, that there was political interference from foreign diplomats during the investigation stage of the cases, it is prudent to re-examine the standards provided under the Rome Statute regarding prosecutorial discretion and evaluate the prosecutorial power and how the Kenyan cases may shape this discretionary power in order to align it with the Preamble of the Rome Statute. The Preamble affirms that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community must not go unpunished. Further, that their effective prosecution must be ensured for the purposes of ending impunity for the perpetrators of international crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.

Israel was spared the worst of the world financial crisis of 2008-2009. However, austerity concerns are by no means invisible in the developments in the field of civil procedure. These concerns correlate heavily with the long-standing Israeli preoccupation with ‘speeding up’ justice. An array of simplified procedural tracks, aimed at addressing the perceived inadequacy of ‘standard’ procedure, have been developed in Israel over the years. The importance of simplified procedures in the Israeli system cannot be overestimated. Their development illustrates the dialectical tension between the values of ‘efficiency’ and ‘quality’ in the administration of justice. During periods of austerity, the scales are easily (or easier) tipped in favour of efficiency and general or particular simplification of procedure. In times of prosperity, on the other hand, concerns over ‘quality’, access to justice, and truth discovery predominate, and attempts at promoting efficiency and/or simplification at their expense tend to be bogged down. Such attempts also tend to lose their extrinsic legitimacy and are widely viewed as ‘cutting corners’. This is evident in the recent Israeli experience with civil procedure reform.

The current debate in Brazilian Civil Procedure revolves around efficiency, legal certainty, and access to justice, not austerity. As a matter of fact, the debate over austerity is nonexistent in Brazil so far. By expanding the access to justice to a broader portion of the society, the legal system increased the number of cases and the costs associated with the judicial system. But the excess litigation and expense associated with the expansion of access to justice has contradictorily curtailed access to justice. This new situation demands new efforts to increase efficiency and legal certainty, while still increasing access to justice.

The Spanish justice system has been shaken by the economic downturn as many other institutions have. This article addresses in the first place some statistical data that shed light as regards to the number of judges and the costs and length of the procedure in Spain. These figures help to understand, in the second place, the impact of austerity measures on the judiciary, namely, the freeze on the hiring of judges and the establishing of high court fees. While they mainly concern the supply side of justice services, others such cost reductions in legal aid have had, in the third place, an impact on the demand side, driving many citizens to social exclusion and to resorting to self-defence mechanisms. The final part of this article addresses some remedies that may alleviate judiciary’s workload, but that fall short of doing it. All in all, the Spanish justice system seems to require a holistic approach to patch up edges, but one in which the role of judge-made justice in a democratic society has to be central again.

Organizational accidents have two generic sources: individual wrongdoings and organizational failures. Economic analysis of tort law is methodologically based on the “fiction” (Gordon 2013) of a rational individual, from which “simple rules for a complex world” (Epstein 1995) are derived. As a result, organizational wrongdoing boils down to a simple principal-agent problem, neglecting the complexity of organizational reality. We shed more light on organizational factors as a separate trigger of organizational wrongdoing. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on the problem, which challenges traditional economic analysis of tort law with insights drawn from organizational science. Moreover, we demonstrate how tort law and economic analysis can be enriched with these insights.

The need to build a legal paradigm corresponding to the current evolution of society is one of the most important challenges that family lawyers are facing in the last years. In this regard, this paper illustrates the new Italian, French, and Irish reforms aimed at pursuing the best interest of the child within non-traditional families.