Towards European rules of civil procedure: Rethinking procedural obligations

From Transnational Principles to European Rules of Civil Procedure is a joint project of the European Law Institute (ELI) and the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT). This paper gives a systematic presentation of the progress by one of the project’s working groups tasked with the elaboration of rules on the obligations of parties, lawyers and judges using as a starting point Principle 11 of the Transnational Principles of Civil Procedure produced by the American Law Institute (ALI) and UNIDROIT. Since November 2014, progress by the Working Group has advanced, resulting in a number of draft rules dealing with procedural obligations (and sanctions for their breach) related to case management, pleading of facts, evidence and law and the efforts to achieve autonomous settlement of civil disputes. The paper describes the major achievements of this work, emphasising several important changes in comparison to the conventional approach to procedural obligations