Inaugural Letter

Dear colleagues and friends,

It is a great honor to have been proposed as President by the Council and the Presidium of the International Association of Procedural Law. At a personal level, I am filled with deep emotion and sincere gratitude for the fact that you have deposited in me the responsibility of heading up the IAPL.

However, this is not an individual challenge but rather a collective commitment. The Council, respecting our by-laws, has decided that the Presidium for the next four years is to be made up as follows: Fernando Gascón Inchausti, as Executive Secretary-General, Masahiko Omura, Vice-president for Asia, Richard Marcus, Vice-president for North America, Burkhard Hess, Vice-president for Europe, Luis Guilherme Marinoni, Vice-president for Latin America and Frédérique Ferrand, Margaret Woo and Remo Caponi as the secretary-general. I could hardly be in better company. It is a real privilege to have the opportunity to work with them for the next four years, and I thank them for accepting the challenge of working together for the benefit of our Association. The decision-making process of the Presidium is, in many ways, horizontal. There is a deep sense of respect and equality among the members. We give great importance to sound arguments, friendship, and relations of cooperation.

Professor Fernando Gascón Inchausti read us the status report of the Association prepared by professor Cadiet, which began by expressing his disappointment at being unable to join us in person. I must add that we are very sorry he is not with us today. We hope he will soon overcome the health issues preventing him from travelling. His work as Executive Secretary, since Salvador de Bahía, in 2007, and later as President in Heidelberg, in 2011, endowed the IAPL with new momentum. With the support of Marcel Storme, Federico Carpi, and Peter Gotwald, he spearheaded a generational transition that made it possible to respond to the challenges posed when the IAPL amended the Bylaws in 2011, forming a new presidium to bring about change with continuity.

Many initiatives have been adopted since 2011, but the values underpinning the IAPL since 1950 have always been faithfully respected. At the end of his report, Cadiet said that one of his duties was to advise the Council on the path to follow in order to ensure the future of the IAPL in the immediate term. He suggested that the fact of the IAPL’s global expansion made it advisable to think that the presidency should be moved to Latin America.

There is an essential symbolic meaning underlying Cadiet’s perspective. In 1950, the committee in charge of establishing the IAPL was composed of nine professors, five from Europe, and four from America. The first congress, where our founding members discussed the creation of the IAPL, was held in Florence in 1950, but the by-laws were adopted in Mexico in 1972. Among the Latin American procedural experts with the greatest influence on our history, I could mention Eduardo J. Couture, Hernando Devis Echandia, Enrique Vescovi, Héctor Fix Zamudio, Cipriano Gomez Lara, José Carlos Barbosa Moreira, Ada Pellegrini Grinover and Augusto Mario Morello. All of them contributed to the robust development of our Association. Today, there are several very active young Latin American proceduralists, as we were able to appreciate during the different sessions of this congress and the call for papers.

In assuming the responsibility proposed by the Council from my Latin American heritage, I a paying homage to the importance of respect for diversity. It is in our differences, in the development of tolerance, in the desire for equality, and in serious academic work, that we find sound bases for growth as a scientific society committed to the improvement of justice. Taking the path of complementarity and pluralism enriches the IAPL and displays its global and integrating character.

Let me return, for a few minutes, to my experience as a Presidium member. During the last eight years, together with Manuel Ortells, Teresa Arruda Alvim and Fernando Gascón Inchausti, who were our executive secretaries, as well as Michele Taruffo, Vice-president for Europe, Masahisa Deguchi and Masahiko Omura, the Vice-presidents for Asia, Oscar Chase and Richard Marcus, the Vice-presidents for North America, and Burkhard Hess, our treasurer, together with Janet Walker and Neil Andrews, the Secretary-general as well as our honorary presidents Marcel Storme, Federico Carpi and Peter Gotwald made up a committed group dedicated to driving the growth of the IAPL.

Those were intensive years during which we achieved major goals. Worth mentioning among them is the fact that two World Congresses were organized: Istanbul (2015), and the one we are now enjoying, thanks to the dedicated work of professor Koichi Miki. Also worthy of mention are colloquia held in Moscow (2012), Athens (2013), Seoul (2014), Bogota (2016) and Tianjin (2017) as well as two International Conferences organized together with the Ibero-american Institute of Procedural Law, first in Buenos Aires (2012) and then in Salamanca (2018). Looking forward, and, as a result of the superior scientific level of our meetings, we are working on the organization of the Colloquium to be held in Porto Alegre (2020), Örebro (2021) and the Ivory Coast (2022) as well as our next World Congress in Lima (2023). All these activities were planned following our House rules on guidelines for congresses, colloquia and other kinds of academic meetings, approved in 2012. These rules provided a framework of predictability for us to develop our relations with the local organizers of each of our congresses.

We are also working on the fourth edition of the post-doctoral Summer School. As already mentioned, the three previous editions were held in Luxembourg, at the Max Planck Institute, thanks to the incomparable hospitality of my dear friend, professor Burkhard Hess. The summer schools have always attracted highly qualified young proceduralists and guest professors, intense and fruitful debates, as reflected in the three volumes published by the Nomos publishing house.

In my opinion, the idea of the inter-generational dialogue developed during the summer school sessions is particularly enriching. Chronological age is but a relative limit, as shown by Roscoe Pound and Giuseppe Chiovenda. The former, at 36, presented us with his now-famous lecture: The causes of popular dissatisfaction with the administration of Justice, while Chiovenda, at 34, gave a conference on Procedural reforms and schools of modern thought. For neither was youth a limit to talent. On the contrary, thanks to their bold thinking, new horizons began to be taken into account.

Nevertheless, the exchange of points of view between generations has certainly proved to be a hallmark of our Association. The summer school provides a fascinating space for mutual personal growth, a place where professional and personal relationships can be strengthened, forming the pillars for the development of future academic projects.

The Istanbul World Congress was the occasion of the award of Cappelletti prize, a second edition of which had already been awarded. The jury, chaired by professor Richard Marcus, and with the participation of Frédérique Ferrand, Remo Caponi, Álvaro Pérez Ragone and Masahisa Deguchi carefully examined the works competing for the prize and delivered the result of its deliberations. Once again, we would like to thank the jury for its in-depth examination of the works submitted in the various IAPL languages. In Salamanca, the Storme prize was awarded within a similar framework. As our former president pointed out, our Journal has notched up a total of seventeen volumes since 2011 and we are currently discussing how to achieve the full recognition of its scientific merits. The Assembly has just approved the amendment to our by-laws, which envisages a major step forward from the institutional viewpoint.

Some of my references above repeat the information provided by our former president: the purpose of this repetition is to underscore the work performed thanks to professor Cadiet’s leadership. I also hope that we will be able to continue to draw on the valuable cooperation of our esteemed former presidents Federico Carpi and Peter Gotwald, from whom we have learned so much, and of the honorary members of the Presidium and of the Council. I am sure we will miss the company of Janet Walker and Michele Taruffo at the Presidium. We extend to them our profound gratitude for the work they have carried out during the last eight years.

Now, from a different and more personal point of view, I wanted to share with you the following. Some years ago, while researching the track record of our first president Alcalá Zamora y Castillo, I found an article he published in 1944, when he was a professor at my University, owing to the fact that he had to go into exile after the Spanish Civil War. The title of the article is “Project for the creation of an Association or an Institute of International Procedural Law”. In it, he describes his first meeting with James Goldschmidt in 1936 at the University of Valencia (Spain) where he proposed the creation of an International Association. At the time, Alcalá Zamora was just 30 and James Goldschmidt, 62. According to Alcalá Zamora, that first attempt was scotched as they were both exiles. Goldschmidt had had to flee, first from Germany, and later from Spain as he was a Jew, before seeking refuge in Montevideo, where he died in 1940. Alcalá Zamora’s journey and long exile took him first to Argentina and later to Mexico. However, it was at that 1936 meeting that the first idea of creating our association was born, one echoed later in Florence, at the congress of the Italian Association in September 1950.

This was when an initial committee, made up of five Europeans: Carnacini, Redenti, Schönke, Schima and Fairén Guillén, and four Americans: Alcalá Zamora, Millar, Couture and Tasso, was set up to create an International Institute of Procedural Law. Alcalá Zamora’s efforts were rewarded at the 1972 Mexico Congress. It is surprising, as we look back—or maybe not—to see that Alcalá Zamora was not part of a group of Europeans. Perhaps at that moment he preferred to align himself with Latin America because of his exile. The fact that the first president of our association should have been a professor of my own university, is however a coincidence that I find surprising.

In 1987 I attended the 8th IAPL World Congress held in Utrecht, chaired by Mauro Cappelletti. I clearly recall the force of his closing address at the Congress. Soon after Utrecht, I was lucky enough to have Cappelletti direct a research project I conducted for a year at the European University Institute, and for him to transmit to me his enthusiasm for the huge potential of the IAPL concerning the key value of access to justice and its various dimensions.

At the closing of the 10th World Congress held in Taormina in 1995, when Marcel Storme, took office as president, he recalled that in 1976, Mauro Cappelletti had been his guest in Ghent. The relationship between Cappelletti and Storme and the support of the then-secretary general, Vittorio Denti, propelled the Association on a new course. At the 6th Ghent Congress (1978) and the 7th Congress in Würzburg (1983), Cappelletti and Storme, supported by Carpi and Gotwald, effectively picked up the baton from the generation of Alcalá Zamora, Redenti, Carnacini and so many others. At the 14th Heidelberg World Congress, a change in continuity was discussed, one referring to the IAPL’s ability to allow successive generations of proceduralists to give of their best in strengthen efforts to improve justice in each era, marked by social, cultural, political and economic requirements.

Our continuity bears testament to the soundness of specific and basic values that have marked our institutional life over time, such as democratic ideas, solidarity, aspirations of equality, and the search for justice with a human face.

Once more, thank you very much for the vote of confidence. We will do our best to measure up to those who preceded us. We are grateful to share in their friendship, dreams, values and feelings.

Kobe, 4 November 2019