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Disobeying Courts’ Orders—A Comparative Analysis Of The Civil Contempt Of Court Doctrine And Of The Imageof The Common Law Judge, Carlo Vittorio Giabardo

Journal of Civil Law Studies

The aim of this article is to briefly tackle, from a comparative viewpoint, an academically quite overlooked topic: techniques of enforcement of lawful judgments. Despite a gradual convergence in many fields of law, common and civil law jurisdictions still maintain a striking diversity in the ways in which they react to non-compliance with court judgments. Whilst in common law tradition, failure to comply with a judicial order is considered civil contempt of court, in civil law countries this legal institution is simply unknown. Furthermore, it is only in civil law systems that failure to comply with a court judgment cannot …