The Idea

The publication in 2005 of this work by The American Law Institute and the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) completes an undertaking that originated about 10 years earlier.

Professor Michele Taruffo and I conceived the idea in conversation during a coffee break at an international conference on comparative civil procedure, in which we were sharing reflections on our prior collaborations in that subject. Professor Taruffo, of the University of Pavia, is a leading expert in the comparison of procedure, particularly in various civil-law systems, including those of Germany, France, Spain, and, of course, Italy. I have long been a student of common-law procedures, particularly their history and the variations in the federal legal systems in the United States. In our previous work, Professor Taruffo and I had addressed such problems as discovery, the burden of proof, and res judicata. We had also completed a book about the American system addressed to lawyers from other countries and to curious minds in the United States.

The basic idea for the Transnational Civil Procedure project was simple: If a “civilian” and a “common lawyer” could so comfortably come to understand each other, the subjects of their professional knowledge must be fundamentally similar. And if the subjects were similar, it must be possible to formulate a single system in mutually coherent terms.