Knowledge of the Foreign Law and the Role of Experts

In 1995, on the occasion of the reform of the Italian system of private international law with the statute no. 218, the legislator opted for considering the determination of the applicable foreign provision a question of law, reversing the previous nor-mative choice to treat it as a question of fact.

Article 14 requires that the courts ascertain the foreign law ex officio, the only way to guarantee a certain degree of normative effectiveness to foreign law within national borders (Carbone 2009). Thus, the interested parties do not need to plead for it or present it as evidence, because domestic courts have both the power and the duty to determine and apply the foreign provisions in compliance with the principle of (aliena) iura novit curia, i.e., “the court knows the (foreign) law.”

Theoretically, foreign law is equated with national law. It follows that article 113, civil procedure code (c.p.c.), stating that Italian judges are supposed to settle cases applying only legal rules,⁸⁷ indistinctly refers to both national and foreign laws.

Besides, a judicial opinion based on a violation or false application of the foreign law could be appealed in front of the Court of Cassation, according to article 360 no. 3 c.p.c., as it would happen in case of violation or false application of a do-mestic provision. Moreover, in case of appeal ex art. 360 no. 3 c.p.c., since the ap-plication of the foreign law is decisive for the settlement of the case, the Supreme Court should not only pronounce the principle of law, but also, being a matter that is lodged ex officio, submit it to the examination of the parties, in compliance with the adversarial principle (article 384 c.p.c.).

Still, the assimilation between national and foreign law is just “tendential,” as stated by doctrinal comments to article 113 c.p.c. (Comoglio et al. 2014). The principle of equality, which informs the Italian system of private international law and forces national judges to apply the foreign law not differently from Italian law, is basically jeopardised by the fact that the law of the forum is mostly privi-leged by the courts. Firstly, exactly in light of lex fori, judges assess if both inter-national harmony and inner coherence are at balance in private interinter-national law

87 Article 113 c.p.c. states that the judiciary generally applies legal rules to settle the case, except if the law allows it to decide according to equity: e.g., ex art. 1226 c.c., when the precise mone-tary amount of a damage cannot be proved, it can be assessed equitably by the judge.

cases. Secondly, whenever both laws are applicable and all other things being equal, courts end up mostly applying inner laws. Moreover, in case it is not possi-ble to ascertain the content of foreign law and no other connecting factor works, the national law is residually applied, according to a corrective mechanism pro-vided by article 14, par. 2.

In addition, it is factitious to think that the court could really know the foreign law as it knows the Italian law. Domestic judges are trained and normally spend their whole professional career in a specific legal order and they cannot be reason-ably required to know and be familiar with all the remainder legal systems, often profoundly dissimilar in linguistic and conceptual terms. As matter stands, foreign law application would prove difficult, if not impossible, for the domestic court, all the more so if it has to be applied “according to its own canons of interpretation and application over time” (art. 15).

Aiming at minimising their cognitive disadvantage, art. 14 supplies a series of informative tools, which favour the acquisition of foreign law, to national courts.

Firstly, courts can profit from those informative measures, which international treaties and supra-national organisations put at their disposal. In this respect, the preceding chapter⁸⁸ has accounted for the role respectively played by the 1968 Eu-ropean Convention on Information on Foreign Law (or London Convention), the 2001 European Judicial Network in civil and commercial matters (EJN-civil), and the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), ideal candidate to coordinate the efforts of institutions and legal information centres towards an as-sisted access to foreign law.

Besides international treaties and networks, art. 14 authorises courts to consult the Ministry of Justice (Ministero della Giustizia) for obtaining appropriate infor-mation through governmental channels. Moreover, judges can resort to experts or specialised institutions, like university professors or research centres, and, last but not least, the parties assist the court in identifying the foreign law and its content.

In most cases, courts either use governmental informative channels, or nominate foreign law experts. Comparing those two tools, expert opinions appear to be more conveniently acquired, both in terms of time and of substantial help they offer: as shown later on, experts reply to precise queries of the judge during the proceed-ings, whereas the Ministry of Justice provides just concise written notes, which take longer to be delivered.

In Italian civil trials, opinion of experts are generally acquired through the insti-tution of trial consultancy. In its original function, the expert assists the court in ascertaining facts that require to analyse particular technical or scientific issues, going beyond the average culture and of which judges have no specific knowledge (Comoglio et al. 2011). Its regulation is included in Book II, Title I, Chapter II of the civil procedure code (articles 191-201), precisely governing the ascertainment of facts and taking of evidence. But, trial consultancy is not a piece of evidence it-self: rather, it allows the judge to acquire a technical opinion to evaluate evidence

88 See chapter 3, sect. 2.2.1.

already gathered by the parties, or to solve questions involving technical or scien-tific competences, as repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court.⁸⁹ It follows that the expert’s actions cannot fall outside of the scope of the facts of the case, both as presented by the parties and as supposedly proved by them according to the bur-den of proof: as the court is subject to the limit of what has been expressly asked by the parties when presenting the case (art. 115 c.p.c.), so is the expert.

By exercising its discretionary power, the court decides whether it is opportune to appoint an expert; in case, it proceeds with an order (art. 191). The appointed experts take part in the judicial hearing arranged during the first appearance of the parties in front of the court (art. 183, par. 7). They conduct the proper investiga-tions, by their own or accompanied by the judge, and can be assisted by the parties or by experts the parties have nominated (art. 194); they finally reply to the specif-ic queries posed by the judge, usually in the form of a written report (art. 195).

The expert opinion is not binding in character, but instructive for the court, which remains peritus peritorum (literally, expert among experts) and has the last word on the evaluation of its outcomes: the court determines if and how to use them to settle the facts of the case. In this regard, it is notable the contradiction of consid-ering judges at the same time not competent to personally evaluate the facts, but competent enough to assess the expert’s technical report (Comoglio et al. 2011).

Logical errors, omissions in the investigations, and inexact application of tech-nical rules, which may affect the expert’s opinion, do not constitute an autono-mous reason to appeal the decision that acknowledges them, unless they funda-mentally vitiate the motivation of that decision (Comoglio et al. 2014). According to the main trend in case law,⁹⁰ if the court endorses the expert’s conclusions and no specific criticism has been raised by the parties, the decision can merely refer to the report, without any express refutations of the parties’ contrary positions, particularly if the report has already sufficiently examined them. On the contrary, in case the court disagrees with the expert, it should adequately motivate why the report is considered untrustworthy and what other elements ground the decision (e.g., Cass. no. 23969/2004).

Trial consultancy has a main objective limit: it cannot concern legal evaluations of facts and the identification and interpretation of the law to be applied to the concrete case, being in force the principle iura novit curia. At a first sight, this should lead to reject the possibility to resort to experts to access the content of the foreign law. Nevertheless, interpreting art. 14, the Supreme Court⁹¹ has observed that national courts has the faculty to resort to experts in order to get familiar with the foreign law content in private international law cases, and the legal doctrine generally sees trial consultancy as the most appropriate solution to acquire such knowledge (Boschiero 1996). Also, the discussion between the appointed expert and the experts nominated by the parties can allow the court to evaluate which of

89 Cass. no. 9461/2010; Cass. no. 3130/2011.

90 Among many, Cass. no. 8355/2007.

91 Cass. civ. sect. I, 09/01/2004, no. 115.

many possible interpretations is preferable (Carbone 2009). The underlying prin-ciple is to increase the chances that the relevant foreign law is correctly applied:

accordingly, judges can “resort to any means, also informal” (e.g., Cass., civ. Un.

Sect., 07/06/2012, no. 9189), including their private knowledge (Carbone 2009), in order to guarantee effectiveness to the foreign law.

At the same time, resorting to experts to apply the foreign law contributes to blur the line that article 14 draws between foreign law as a question of law or as a question of fact, a troublesome issue both in common law and civil law systems.

Besides, the court acquires the content of the foreign law indirectly, as it is report-ed by the expert. On the one hand, the court interprets the foreign law and moti-vates its application; on the other hand, at least normally, it is probably ignorant of the original context of that law, the language in which that law is expressed, and its possible consequences for the domestic system. Canale (2015) addresses a sim-ilar situation, occurring when the court does not know the content of a legal provi-sion, because it is expressed in a technical or scientific language it does not mas-ter, and anyway applies such content, as identified by experts, to decide the case.

This happens more and more frequently, e.g., when the applicable law governs the sale of chemical products, such as pharmaceuticals, or regulates technical activi-ties. In such cases, it is not rare that administrative bodies intervene to set stand-ards that end up identifying the applicative conditions of laws and that cannot be evaluated by judges, who lack the required competences. Canale names the situa-tion “opacity of norms:” these norms would be opaque both for the judge, substan-tially unaware of what is applying also after the expert’s intervention, and for the experts, unable to assess the legal consequences of their opinions. Besides, the au-thor affirms that the experts’ job impacts also on interpretation and decision mak-ing, preventing judges from interpreting the law when necessary. For instance, the court would not be able to detect ambiguities or vague terms in the text for it is not able to understand the text itself completely.

In some way, the foreign norm as well is and remains “opaque” to the domestic court in many respects: the court needs to be assisted in acquiring knowledge of foreign law content, and has a limited vision on the foreign legal system, also after obtaining the expert’s opinion. But, is this enough to maintain that expert opinions nullify the interpretive and argumentative power/duty of courts? If so, we should presume that, whenever the court is helped in accomplishing its task, it is de facto delegating its decisional power to others. Thus, when it resorts to ordinary trial consultancy, the court would basically abdicate responsibility for the case, instead of simply benefiting from a supplementary tool, provided for by the lawmaker, to better fulfill its obligations, in compliance with the interests of the parties.

Similarly, we cannot deduce that the indirect (acquisition of) knowledge of the foreign law, even if existing and, at present, unavoidable, implies that the court does not interpret it. Rather, from this, it follows that its interpretive choices may be practically influenced by what the experts propose as foreign law. Therefore, the evaluation of experts assisting the judiciary in foreign law application should not be limited to the usual parameters, testing their personal and professional

cred-ibility, trustworthiness, expertise and the general consistency of delivered opin-ions. But it should also measure the coherence of the provided legal information in the framework of the foreign legal order (e.g., with reference to case law, or legal doctrine), the consistency of more possible interpretations of the foreign rule, and the authority and legitimacy of the sources supporting their opinions.