This book compares the law on provisional measures of common law and
civil law countries, the goal being to identify and compare their main
advantages and disadvantages. The guiding concept is a well-known
statement by the Justices of the US Supreme Court expressed in the
famous Grupo Mexicano case, according to which the "age of slow-moving
capital and comparatively immobile wealth" has now passed, and the 21st
century requires a fresh look at the law of provisional measures. In the
quest to find a model for interim relief, the Mareva Injunction,
subsequently renamed the 'Freezing Order' in the English Civil
Procedural Rules, is used as the benchmark to which each of the targeted
systems discussed here is compared. This is because international
scholarship, as well as e.g. the US Supreme Court, generally consider
the Mareva Injunction to be the most effective and farthest-reaching
provisional remedy. The analysis suggests that the Mareva Injunction /
Freezing Order represents the type of relief that will most likely
continue to dominate as the most efficient and farthest-reaching interim
measure in the years to come.