A Comparative Analysis Between the Italian civil proceeding and the American Civil Proceeding Before Federal Courts

Simona Grossi, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

The present comparative study analyzes the Italian civil proceeding and the civil proceeding before the US federal courts in a comparative perspective, mainly focusing on the following themes: (i) structure of proceeding; (ii) the law of evidence; (iii) evidentiary phase in the Italian proceeding, as compared with the pretrial discovery and admission of evidence at trial in the US civil proceeding; and (iv) judicial decision making process and appeal procedures in both systems. The comparative analysis then leads to identify the best solutions which each system adopted in terms of efficiency and fairness and shows where such solutions could be used or somehow could inspire the adoption of different solutions by the other legal system (the one less efficient and/or less “fair”).