Nullities and the effects of defective procedural acts in European law

The paper examines the path along which the european systems have developed their own voidness regime of procedural acts: since the origin of the legislative primacy of nullity in France to the current features of the English or German system. The turning point seems to be the settling of principles that, nowadays more and more emerging on the law’s surface (e.g. in the new Bazilian Code), provide the judge with the main tool in order to shape a fair process much more than ensure the legitimacy of a single act. These principles play the key-role in applying the procedural law to the given case, making the judge as the king of the trial but also putting at risk the forseeability of the procedural law, whose rank is eventually lowered.