In my master’s thesis I wrote about the service of documents in legal proceedings through the prism of the Slovenian and French legal systems. Service of process is an elementary act of the litigation process in which the rights of the parties are decided upon. The party must be given the knowledge of the procedural acts of the court and of the opposing party, and must be able to invoke the principle of an adversarial procedure, which is upheld by both legal systems. I therefore began my master’s thesis by examining the meaning of the adversarial principle for the proceedings and compared its conception in the context of the Slovenian legal system, the French legal system and in the European Convention of Human Rights. In the second part of the master’s thesis, I analysed in more detail the individual issues within the service of process. Both the first and the second system regulate individual issues in a similar way, with minor differences, such as regarding the refusal to accept a document, the unknown address, and substituted service. In the context of substituted service, I have found that the French system places a big emphasis on personal service. Therefore, only when all possibilities of personal service have been exhausted is it possible to proceed with substituted service. The biggest difference between the two systems is, however, the person serving the documents. In the Slovenian system, the documents are served by the Post of Slovenia, whereas the French system distinguishes between the concept of general notification and the concept of service, a term reserved exclusively for a private person serving the documents, the so-called commissaire de justice. For better understanding, the analysis of the different issues is accompanied, throughout the thesis, by examples from case law.
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