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Recent Developments In West German Civil Procedure, William B. Fisch

Faculty Publications

The most comprehensive description of the West German civil litigation system to appear in United States law journals, a much-admired, practice-oriented work by two United States law professors and a Hamburg judge, was published twenty-five years ago. At that moment, a commission of experts, appointed in 1955 by the Federal Ministry of Justice and called the Commission to Prepare a Reform of Civil Justice, was already deep into a thorough reexamination of the entire West German system. The stimuli for this reexamination were the eternal devils of judicial procedure everywhere: technicality, inaccessibility, and above all, delay and cost. In 1961, …