It is one thing to say what civil litigation is; it is another to say what are the purposes which the institution of civil litigation exists to serve. It is interest in the latter — which are not the same as the purposes of those who engage in litigation — that is one of the principal factors connecting the succeeding chapters of this book. This chapter looks to what civil litigation is.

It might be thought that the phrase ‘civil litigation’ and its companions, ‘civil proceedings’ and ‘civil procedure’, are well enough known to stand without explanation. All three form part of the everyday language of lawyers, and even Parliament has been prepared to use an unbroken circle by way of definition, as it did, for example, in the Civil Evidence Act 1968: ‘civil proceedings’, it is said, ‘includes in addition to civil proceedings in any of the ordinary courts of law’, certain other ‘civil proceedings’.

This kind of thing may be harmless when only one legal system is in contemplation; it is unlikely that a French lawyer would have any more trouble within his own system with the phrase ’procedure civile’ than his English counterpart has with ‘civil procedure‘. Indeed, the French lawyer has a code of civil procedure, now the nouveau code de procedure civile, and for him civil procedure is the subject matter of that code. What is more, an English lawyer would almost certainly recognise as civil the kind of proceedings regulated by that code and recognised as such in France.