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The very large «open list» of fundamental rights that we have in Europe can only be shared with difficulty with countries belonging to another area of civilisation like Arab-Muslim countries. However Muslim jurisconsults have retained as early as the VIIth century a certain number of fundamental rights such as the respect of life, of human beings, of human dignity, and the dismissal of constraint in religion. More recently the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has multiplied Islamic declarations of human rights inspired from the Universal Declaration of 1948. But all these rights, regarded as gifts of God, can only be exercised in accordance to the content of the law He has given to men, the Charï'a. It still occupies a prominent place in the legal order of Arab and Muslim countries, especially in those proclaiming to be Islamic states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Soudan, …). All must respect its dispositions and especially the ones which establish a discriminatory regime towards women and nonmuslims and restrictions to the freedom of conscience. This obviously results in a noticeable reduction of the number of fundamental rights recognised in these countries, and at any case in the limitation of their exercise.

The article analyzes the interrelationship between procedural laws and their embedding legal cultures. In doing so, it addresses mainly the following topics: party disposition, structure of civil procedure, law of evidence, written, oral, and public procedure, access to justice, and the distribution of roles between the court and the parties to litigation. Although the civil procedures of the various traditional law families have retained many characteristic features, their fundamental principles are more and more converging on the basis of a more or less common legal culture of Western civilization. The most significant differences exist between the American jury model and all the other procedural models independently of their origin and genesis. But American juries will not completely disappear because they are until now the only really appropriate democratic counterbalance to the growth of economic power and to worldwide market freedoms without worldwide enforceable regulations. Nevertheless it is to be expected that a second procedural model for less spectacular cases will develop in the U. S. completely harmonizing with worldwide accepted principles of civil procedure.

England & Wales celebrated in April the fifth anniversary of the reform of its civil justice system, reform conducted by Lord Woolf and implemented in 1999. Beyond a mere change of legal rules, the Woolf reform laid the emphasis on a change of culture: the adverserial culture had rendered its civil justice system too costly, too long and too complicated. Yet, has this change of judicial approach been followed by an effective change in mentalities? Was it in the litigants' interest to sacrifice some of the quality of its justice for a wider access? This article explores the origins of the reform and attempts to assess whether, five years after its implementation, the English civil justice system has succeeded in becoming more accessible without compromising its legendary quality.

The 60th anniversary of the Italian Civil Code and the bicentennial of the Code Napoleon call for a reflection over the structure and the aesthetics of the two codes as well as over the very idea of codification in the global legal scenario. After exploring the complex cultural and political process that led to the Italian Code of 1942, the authors investigate its defining features in a comparative perspective. Although strongly influenced by the Code Napoleon, the Italian Code displays a remarkable originality, embracing a social vision that, purged of the fascist •verbal contaminations” proved an enduring legacy. In the final part of the essay, the authors tackle the question of the longevity and desirability of codification as a regulatory tool in the global scenario. The novel awareness of the role played by the courts as well as the massive outpouring of statutory regulations and the impact of European law add new complexity to the long debated issue of codification.

efficiency which is not necessarily confused with an economic analysis of Law, and by defending the pluralism of law systems, a token of modernity: the competition of Laws allows the juridical rivalry and does not prevent from converging Laws rationally or spontaneously, in some specific fields. About that, the influence of the civil law systems also certainly requires the construction of international instruments with all due respect to varied legal traditions. The civil law systems, in particular French one, are high performance; their intrinsic qualities, their still current influence and their renewed concern for following the most recent advances •especially in technology •are evidence of that. Far from dying, they do need a positive support.

Since 1986 and the VIth Congress of its Communist Party, The Vietnam of «Doi Moi» or «renovation» has committed itself to a form economic development in which law would play a central part. Thus the 1990s have been the years of the reemergence of a legal discourse subordinated until then to «democratic centralism» and the leading influence of the Party on the State and society. This strong political will was part of an ambitious project that was the promotion of a rule of law able to support Vietnam's opening to the world, and its integration into the globalization process by a genuine adaptation of its norms and legal practices to international standards. This legal harmonization phenomena, related to a general tendency of globalization of law, was also responding to a clear message formulated by the big financial and economic international organizations which considering that a transparent and predictable environment within which an efficient, accessible, professional and impartial justice could exist, is both the engine of economic development and the guarantee of a political legitimacy. As a candidate to the WTO, Vietnam has not failed to create an implicit link between law and economy by amending its constitution in 2001. So «the socialist rule of law» could enable the building of the foundations of a «socialist market economy». But what kind of rule of law are we talking about? Would it be conceivable to export a legal system that would have been separated from its democratic values base?