1 Fin de non-recevoir Elisabetta Silvestri I must confess that to elaborate on the concept of fin de non-recevoir with the view to offering possible translations of the expression in languages other than French gave me a serious headache. In order to educate myself and refresh my knowledge of French civil procedure, I decided to start from the notion of the fin de non-recevoir according to the Code de procédure civile. Article 122 Constitue une fin de non-recevoir tout moyen qui tend à faire déclarer l'adversaire irrecevable en sa demande, sans examen au fond, pour défaut de droit d'agir, tel le défaut de qualité, le défaut d'intérêt, la prescription, le délai préfix, la chose jugée. As to a clear definition of the concept, I have chosen the following: ‘le moyen de défense visant à sanctionner le défaut de droit d’agir en justice par un rejet de l’act processuel que constitue la demande, sans examen au fond’ (Guinchard, Ferrand and Chenais, 2013, 77). The claim is rejected, and therefore the lawsuit ends, due to the lack of ‘right of action’, a lack that, in its turn, can derive from a variety of circumstances. Having (more or less) pinned down the concept, I have tried to analyze it within a wider framework, first with reference to Italian civil procedure, and then taking into account the language of adjudication in common law jurisdictions. To begin with, I have jotted down a schematic of the defenses allowed in a lawsuit under French and Italian law. Moyens de défense Difese del convenuto ------ Mere difese (e.g., simple denial of the factual allegations made by the plaintiff) Exceptions de procédure Eccezioni processuali Fins de non-recevoir ------- Défenses au fond Eccezioni di merito While French law, at least to my knowledge, does not recognize as a separate kind of defenses what in Italy we call mere difese (but that does not seem to me a particular problem in the context of a translation), it is worth emphasizing that Italian civil procedure does not know any 1