Revista da EMERJ - V. 21 - N. 3 - Setembro/Dezembro - 2019 - Tomo 1

73  R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 21, n. 3, t. 1, p. 72-86, set.-dez., 2019  TOMO 1 overcome resort to self-help. 4 The regulation of civil proceedings became a fundamental part of public law, 5 constituting a pillar of state building in continental Europe: the prohibition of self-help and state civil justice, as a trade-off for such a prohibition. On the other side, the basic elements of civil proceedings (from standing to sue, to adjudication) were aimed at protecting the “new bourgeois individual” and his economic freedom in a fragmented and individualistic perspective on social relationships. Thus, civil procedure was Janus-faced or acted as an interface: one face looked to public law, as civil proceedings are mainly set up by the state; the other looked to private law, as civil proceedings aim to protect individual rights. The great divide between private and public law caused the theory and practice of judicial protection of rights to be affected by a sort of magnetic field and to oscillate between these two opposite conceptual poles. The tension between the private interest of litigants and the public interest of the State as a provider of dispute resolution services is an “eternal” feature of civil procedure. However, the extent to which the State (or the polity) is involved in the business of dispute resolution may vary considerably across time, ranging from a minimum in which the only relevant public interest is to keep the conflict-resolution services running at the minimum cost, chiefly providing incentives for the litigants to settle their dispute through an alternative dispute resolution procedure, to a maximum in which the resolution of the dispute is the occasion for the State (or the polity) to apply a body of substantive law, implementing where appropriate social goals and policies going beyond the mere resolution of a dispute. This holds even truer in the European Union, as the regulation of disputes with cross-border implications by the European law of civil procedure is a remarkable example of the presence of public policy concerns, in terms of the unobstructed operation of the internal market and development of an area of freedom, security and justice. Therefore, taking into account current developments in western legal systems, the key opposition, as to the goals of civil justice systems, appears to be between the “pure and simple” (interest-based) settlement of disputes and the application of the law on the occasion of 4 Nörr , Naturrecht und Zivilprozess, 1976, 3, 48. 5 Boehmer , Ius publicum universale, ex genuinis iuris naturae principiis deductum et in usum iuris publici particularis qua- rum cunque rerum publicarum adornatum, Halae Magdeburgicae, 1710, 499.