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A person filing a civil claim faces the risk of being unable to enforce a favourable judgment. This is because their opponent may dissipate his assets and consequently be unable to satisfy a judgment given against him. Several mechanisms seek to alleviate this risk by preserving the defendant’s assets pending judgment. These are predominantly the civilian in rem order and the common law freezing order. Fundamental differences between the common and civil law traditions may be observed in the freezing order and its civilian counterpart. Primarily, these are to be found in the margin of discretion given to the judge and the sanctions against non-compliance. The latter issue is closely related to the entity against which an order is directed: in the common law it is directed against the person, while in the civil law, against the asset. The significantly diverse approaches in these areas show the different course each of the legal families has taken in the administration of justice. The problem of preserving assets pending judgment becomes more complicated when the assets are not located in the same country as the courts with jurisdiction on the merits. The recently introduced European Account Preservation Order (‘EAPO’) regulation is a pre-judgment instrument which enables a litigant to obtain an order preventing the transfer of funds held by the respondent in a bank account within the EU. It is the first of what may become several EU-wide provisional and protective measures. At first glance, the EAPO resembles the continental model rather than its common law counterpart, and, thus, brings into the open the differences between the two traditions in the area of provisional and protective measures. This work examines whether the features of the common law tradition—which in fact derive from the law of equity—ie judicial discretion in granting or refusing relief and contempt of court sanctions, could improve the EAPO as well as other EU-wide provisional and protective measures that may follow. It is argued that greater judicial discretion and a contempt sanction, provided that they are kept within certain limits, would improve the EAPO and similar measures in terms of efficiency and fairness.

Defining the collapse probability of existing nonseismically designed RC buildings is a challenge mainly due to the fact that its determination relies on the simulation of the brittle failure modes controlling the collapse mechanism. Routine nonlinear dynamic analysis of ductile RC frames is not applicable for such buildings, which often fail prior to the attainment of their flexural capacity. An alternative approach to define collapse probability is proposed in this paper through the explicit definition of the failure mode hierarchy. A number of brittle failure modes are considered as credible and the corresponding capacity is calculated. The prevalent collapse mode is identified through capacity prioritization of the failure modes, and the corresponding peak ground acceleration at collapse is defined. This value, along with the associated variability, is substituted in a lognormal distribution to derive fragility curves for typical design and construction details. The main conclusion drawn from the processing of the results is that disregarding the brittle failure modes and accounting solely for flexural ductile behavior greatly underestimates the probability of collapse of such buildings. © 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers. 144 2

International audience; The effectiveness of seismic retrofitting of RC-frame buildings by converting selected bays into new walls through infilling with RC walls was studied experimentally using a full-scale four-storey model tested with the pseudo-dynamic (PsD) method. The frames were designed and detailed for gravity loads only using different connection details between the walls and the bounding frame. In order to simulate the experimental response, two numerical models were formulated differing at the level of modelling. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the capabilities of these models to simulate the experimental nonlinear behaviour of the tested RC building strengthened with RC infill walls and comment on their effectiveness. The comparison between the capacity, in terms of peak ground acceleration, of the strengthened frame and the one of the bare frame, which was obtained numerically, has shown a five-fold increase.

A large part of the existing building stock was not designed according to the current codes in seismic prone regions. The poor performance of some reinforced concrete structures was related to the presence of the masonry infill walls. Although the infill walls can increase the lateral resistance of frames in many cases, it is widely recognized that there is a high vulnerability of the masonry infill walls subjected to loadings along and perpendicular to their plane. Several collapses were observed after past earthquakes in infilled frame buildings. For this reason, different retrofitting design approaches have been proposed and used during the last years; however, many of them do not fit with the building’s owners’ economic demands or technical knowledge of the workmanship. Over the years, significant research has been conducted for masonry wall elements retrofitted with textile-reinforced mortar (TRM). However, much less has been carried for masonry-infilled frame RC frames. Thus, this manuscript aims to provide a literature review about research on assessing the effectiveness of using TRM technique to reduce masonry-infilled RC frames’ seismic vulnerability. Experimental findings will be deeply analysed to provide full insight concerning the TRM’s efficiency under in-plane and/or out-of-plane demands of infilled frames and some variables such as anchorage of the TRM to the structure. Numerical modelling approaches to simulate the complex behaviour of infilled frames with TRM are also presented to stress their benefits or limits. Covering completely all aspects of this manuscript is essential to briefly describe the studies conducted so far to examine either numerically or experimentally the effectiveness of using TRM for retrofitting masonry wall elements.