Chiara Besso Marcheis

Università del Piemonte Orientale

Litigants' duty to disclose: a forgotten example of the Italian legal heritage

2007-2008

Chiara Besso is Full Professor of Law at University of Piemonte Orientale in Italy. Member of the Board of the Review "Giurisprudenza Italiana", of the Doctoral school "European Law, History and Law Systems", of the Doctorate on "Foundations of the European Law and Comparative Method", and of the "Scuola di specializzazione per le professioni legali" (Universities of Torino and Piemonte Orientale), she has been Visiting Fellow at the London Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and at the University College of Oxford.
Her areas of research are law of evidence, discovery, reforms of civil procedure, and irregularity of acts.
She is the author of several articles on civil procedure topics (above all civil procedure reforms, taking of evidence, probability and judicial reasoning), and two books on pre-action discovery and procedural formalism (La prova prima del processo; 2004, La sentenza civile inesistente, 1997).
At the Italian Academy, she will be exploring the evolution of the litigants' duty to discover information. She will focus on the origins of the Anglo-American discovery, starting from its antecedent in Roman-canon law methods, as a tool to understand the present differences between the Anglo-American and the European continental attitudes to the ascertainment of truth and to explore the chances to build a notion of the duty to discover acceptable to both civil law and common law countries.