In the civil trial, the appeal is the second degree of judgment with which the losing party disputes the unfavorable decision: how it works, what are the measures that can be appealed, and which are not.
What happens if you lose a civil case? We often hear people say: see you on appeal! But what is the appeal and what is its purpose? The appeal, in the context of the civil trial, can be defined as an opposition to a first unfavorable sentence, made by one of the parties, the one that proved to be a loser: in other words, the purpose of the appeal is to judge again the merit of the cause, that is who is right and who is wrong. The appeal, therefore, it represents one of the means of appeal provided for by the code of civil procedure, which allows the person concerned – through his defense counsel – to bring a decision in which one has come out losers before another judge. k
The new judgment takes place before the competent Court of Appeal which also include Appeal Attorneys with respect to the Court that issued the contested decision. The judge assigned to review the dispute, therefore, will check again the evidence that has already been presented in the first trial. It goes without saying that new elements cannot be introduced, as will be seen below, since – if this were the case – it would not be possible to re-examine them since the appeal is not foreseen. We will see, however, that in some exceptional cases there is the possibility of introducing evidence in the second trial. The purpose of the appeal is therefore to correct the judgment of the first instance judgment. So much so that the sentence is completely replaced, both when it is confirmed and when it is corrected. In this article, we will try to explain how the appeal judgment works and what it is used for.
Appeal: when is it excluded?
In principle, therefore, the sentences of the first instance sentence can be questioned with this instrument. The civil procedure code [1] – in fact – provides that all sentences of conviction issued at first instance can be appealed unless the appeal is excluded by law or by the agreement between the parties.
What are the final sentences?
They are, therefore, sentences that cannot be appealed by law:
Sentences that the judge has pronounced according to equity, rather than according to law: deciding according to equity means applying, in the formulation of sentences, rules commonly accepted by society and inspired by principles of moral and social impartiality. In other words, the judge must decide according to his own legal experience and resolve the dispute by offering the parties a solution inspired by rules that he draws from the concrete case. In the judgment according to law, on the other hand, the judge decides on the basis of the norms proper to the law, intervening – instead – the judgment according to equity when there are gaps in the law to fill them according to a quantitative assessment.