Revista da EMERJ - V. 22 - N.1 - Janeiro/Março - 2020

 R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 22, n. 1, p. 11 - 26, Janeiro-Março. 2020  12 out-of-court settlement, after having evaluated the matter of the debate and the willingness of the parties. The resolution of the dispute through mediation can also be founded on a statutory or contractual clause. Finally, and most importantly for what con- cerns the topic of this article, the Law asked for a compulsory attempt to mediate 1 , as condition of legal action, in a number of matters, which is now estimated to represent around 8% of the civil and commercial courts’ docket. The selected disputes ranged from banking and finance contracts to property rights, landlord/tenant disputes, condominium disputes, medical mal- practice, insurance, division of goods, trusts and estates, loans, leasing of companies, and defamation (libel and slander). Ini- tially, car accidents were included too. The legislative act, which was in part occasioned by the European Directive n. 2008/52/ CE, was intended to set an experimental phase of six years af- ter which the application of mandatory mediation and its effects would be tested and, possibly, confirmed. Last year, Legislative Decree n. 50/2017, later converted in Law n. 96/2017, stabilized the discipline of mediation by erasing its temporary and experi- mental nature. As far as we know, this legal reform resulted in the larg- est mandatory mediation programme for civil cases in Europe – if not in the world. Although several jurisdictions nowadays feature mediation by judge order, or compel mediation in rea- son of the disputed matter, none of them envisions such an ex- tended application of compulsory mediation. Studies testify that the number of yearly mediations in Italy, which has surpassed 200.000 cases, is about twenty times higher than those from other European countries, according to their available data 2 . The wide range of matters involved in compulsory mediation and the con- 1 On December 12th, 2012 the Italian Constitutional Court declared compulsory mediation unconstitutio- nal due to a procedural fault. Under the input of the European Union, Legislative Decree 69/2013 reintro- duced it starting from September 20th, 2013. 2 Main data about mediation in this article come from the Ministry of Justice DG STAT database, whose statistics about 2017 can be found at https://webstat.giustizia.it/Analisi%20e%20ricerche/Civil%20media- tion%20in%20Italy%20-%20Year%202017%20(ENG).pdf (accessed July 13th, 2018). And from ISDACI data- base, whose 2017 Ninth Report over the diffusion of alternative justice in Italy can be found at http://www. isdaci.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/eBook_nono-rapporto_ISDACI.pdf (accessed July 13th, 2018).