建立民事诉讼的快速机制,提高诉讼速度,是《民事诉讼法》修改的重要目标和内容。面对‘诉讼爆炸’,寻求民事诉讼的快速解决途径是各国民事诉讼的共同发展趋势。以美国为例,每年3千万左右的诉讼案件,使得这个司法资源丰富的国家不得不改变诉讼方式,以便加快诉讼速度。在美国,有统计显示,被起诉的案件只有少于1.5%的民事案件由陪审团审判,而且这一比例还有继续减少的趋势。在英国,上议院大法官沃尔夫爵士(LordWoolf)在二十世纪90年代中期领导的民事诉讼改革受到了高度重视,其改革报告中提出的许多新理念,都意在提高诉讼速度,比如尽量避免诉讼、诉论程序应当简化、诉讼案件的审理时间应当缩短、民事诉讼应当减少对抗性增加合作性等。近几年中国法院每年办结的各类案件800万件左行,呈现出逐年上升的趋势,国家的司法资源是有限的,从诉讼程序着眼,建立 Establishing a quick mechanism of civil procedure and speeding up the procedure is an important goal and content of the revision of the Civil Procedure Law. In the face of the explosion of litigation, the quick way to seek civil lawsuit is the common trend of civil litigation in all countries. Take the United States as an example. About 30 million litigation cases each year make it very difficult for those countries rich in judicial resources to change their methods of litigation in order to speed up the proceedings. In the United States, statistics show that only less than 1.5% of civil cases in the prosecuted cases are tried by juries and there is a tendency that this proportion will continue to decrease. In the United Kingdom, Lord Woolf, the Lord Justice of the House of Lords, took the lead in civil litigation reform in the mid-1990s and placed much emphasis on its reform. Many of the new ideas raised in his reform report are intended to speed up litigation, for example, Avoiding litigation, litigation procedures should be simplified, litigation should be shortened trial time, civil litigation should reduce confrontation and increase cooperation and so on. In recent years, 8 million pieces of various cases handled by Chinese courts per year have left the line, showing a trend of increasing year by year. The state’s judicial resources are limited. From the perspective of litigation procedures, the establishment of