【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 or the injury he has suffered, showing that the private initiative can replace public solidarity, upon which pensation schemes are generally built.At the end of the day, the assignment of liability claims produces the effects of a settlement for the assignor, which waives its right to bring an action against the liable party in exchange of a monetary advantage. However, the claim is not extinguished with respect to the liable party whose situation has not changed.. Issues at stake.Financing civil litigation by way of assignment of liability claims has not been used in practice so far, at least not on a large scale. This naturally raises two main questions. The first one is to determine whether the assignment of liability claims for speculation purposes is legally admissible or contrary to public policy. In part 2, the parison between English and French law regarding the legality of an assignment of liability claims indicates that European legal systems are divided on the issue.In Part 3, the second question of whether de lege lata or de lege ferenda the assignment of liability claims is a technique economically viable and desirable will be addressed. In this part, it will be submitted that this is the case, especially as a solution to the absence of other techniques, such as mandatory damage insurance, pensation schemes or class actions, which already aim at finding an alternative to the traditional way of seeking pensation for an injured party, that is to individually claim for it in court. Finally, in Part 4, one of the advantages of the assignment of liability claims over other techniques will be highlighted, that is to technically enable to have recourse to financial markets by the securitization of such claims. This facilitates the raising of capital for financing civil litigation and allows the transfer of the risk related to liability claims at low transaction costs. Naturally, the inconveniences of this technique of financing civil litigation and of the securitization of claims should not be underestimated.2. The legality of the assignment of liability claimsEuropean legal systems are divided on the issue whether assignments of liability claims are legally acceptable. Some consider that public policy considerations prohibit the modification of unliquidated liability claims and their transfer for pure speculation purposes. The analysis of English and French law shows this difference of approach. However, it seems that one of the tendencies is now to admit this technique of financing civil litigation since the general prohibition of champerty is fading away.. The general prohibition of assignability of rights of action in English law.England is probably the European country where the costs of legal proceedings are the highest. For financing civil litigation, several methods have been developed such as the after the event insurance, which is the insurance policy subscribed after the loss is suffered in order to guarantee the risk of losing the lawsuit and to be obliged to reimburse the legal costs incurred by the winning Access to Justice Act 1999 has further encouraged the recourse to this mechanism by allowing the policy subscriber to be awarded, as damages, the price paid for contracting the insurance.However, a pure speculative assignment of liability claims is still prohibited in English law. It is true that the Criminal Law Act 1967 has abolished the criminal and tortious liability for maintenance and champerty, but the same act provides that this decriminalization “shall not affect any rule of law as to the cases in which a contract is to be treated as contrary to public policy or otherwise illegal”.As a consequence of this, the traditional prohibition of assignment of “mere rights of action” remains the rule. Posterior case law has indeed maintained the solution and, even if the scope of the prohibition was restricted, it remained for speculative assignment.. Assignment of claims in tort.Legal doctrine synthesizing case law distinguishes between claims in contract and claims in tort. For the latter, it is impossible for the injured party to sell his right to sue the tortfeasor and there are no other exceptions than the right for the insurance pany to be subrogated in the rights to sue the tortfeasor after the pensation of the victim who is the insured party. Lord Denning at an earlier tage of the Trendex Trading Corporation case explained the reasons behind the prohibition of assignment of liability claims in tort by stating that: “as far as personal torts are concerned, like damages for libel or slander, or for assault, or for personal injury, the judges have often said that they cannot be assigned. This, I think, still holds good. There are good reasons of public policy for not allowing an assignment: because of the danger that the assignee may buy up the claim at a small figure and use it to get a big profit for himself. In short, all the evils which our fore fathers saw in champerty.”What is admissible instead is the possibility to agree with an investor to assign the proceeds of the action that could be recovered in exchange of the financing of the A clear distinction has therefore to be made between the assignment of the liability claim and the assignment of (part of) the proceeds of the liability claim. The situation is different because the control over the claim is transferred to the assignee in the first case, but not in the latter, and because in the first situation the price is immediately paid and in the second one the consideration for the assignment of part of the proceeds of the action is only the funding of the litigation.. Assignment of claims in contract.As regards contractual claims, the prohibition of assignment of mere right of action is discussed in practice and the House of Lords has adopted an intermediate solution in the leading case Trendex Trading Corporation v. Cr233。dit Until recent, funding of litigation by third