Civil procedure in the United States

Early federal and state civil procedure in the United States was rather ad hoc and was based on traditional common law procedure but with much local variety. There were varying rules that governed different types of civil cases such as "actions" at law or "suits" in equity or in admiralty; these differences grew from the history of "law" and "equity" as separate court systems in English law. Even worse, discovery was generally unavailable in actions at law. In order to obtain discovery, a party to a legal action had to bring a collateral proceeding, a bill in equity in aid of discovery, just to obtain essential documents or testimony from the opposing party.[2]

Procedure in the early federal courts was rather incoherent. The Process Act of 1792 authorized the federal courts to write their own procedural rules for everything but actions at law. In the context of actions at law, the earlier Process Act of 1789 was so poorly written that it forced a federal court sitting in a state to apply the common law rules of pleading and procedure that were in effect in the state at the time it joined the Union, regardless of whether the state had modified or revised its civil procedure system since.[3] In other words, even though a state's common law pleading system was always constantly evolving through case law, the federal courts in that state were literally frozen in time (a concept now known as "static conformity"). The Process Acts of 1789 and 1792 did not expressly address the problem of what procedural laws to apply in the federal courts in new states that joined the Union after the original Thirteen Colonies. In 1828, Congress enacted a law which stated that such courts would follow the civil procedure in effect at the time those states joined the Union.[4]

Unfortunately for the federal courts, state civil procedure law began to diverge dramatically in the mid-19th century.[5] In the 1840s, the law reformer David Dudley Field II launched a movement away from common law pleading and towards what came to be called "code pleading." Common law pleading operated under ad hoc procedures that developed haphazardly through case law—the forms of action. In other words, a particular procedure was followed just because some (often ancient) decision said so, but none of those decisions were looking at whether the entire procedural system made sense. In contrast, code pleading was supposed to be carefully designed, at least in theory, with the entire lifecycle of a case in mind so that it would be simple, elegant, and logical, and was implemented by the enacting of a "code of civil procedure" by the state legislature. At common law, procedure came first and substance came second; code pleading flipped those priorities around and focused on the cause of action.[6] Eventually, 24 states enacted versions of the Field Code in part or in whole. Other states nominally retained the forms of action but refused to adopt code pleading because they had developed their own workarounds. For example, Virginia developed its own unique system of "motion pleading", based on a "motion for judgment" which functions like a pleading.[7]

By the late 19th century, lawyers were becoming very frustrated with having to follow procedures that had been obsolete in their states for decades every time they litigated actions at law in federal courts.[8] In response, Congress finally enacted the Conformity Act of 1872, which directed federal courts to conform their procedure in such actions to the current practice in the states in which they were sitting (i.e., "dynamic conformity").[8] Federal courts were allowed to continue to develop the federal common law of evidence (most of which was replaced a century later by the Federal Rules of Evidence).

However, allowing federal courts to conform to current state procedure still did not solve the federal courts' problems with actions at law, because by the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. was a mix of common law and code pleading states. Even worse, many code pleading states had merged common law and equity procedure into a unified civil procedure system, which directly clashed with the federal courts' preservation of the traditional English division between the two bodies of procedural law.[9] The inevitable result was confusion and chaos in the federal courts,[10] particularly as interstate commerce escalated with the Second Industrial Revolution and an increasing number of cases between citizens of different states were heard in federal courts under diversity jurisdiction. The glaring deficiencies in the Conformity Act, especially the assumption that a federal court would always sit in a U.S. state, caused severe problems in extraterritorial federal courts such as the United States Court for China.

The American legal landscape is strewn with procedural reform efforts. There have been innumerable revisions to the FRCP, and to the nation’s state procedural rules, in the eighty years since promulgation of the FRCP. The resulting procedural diversity has been both valued and vilified. Various critics have disavowed the efficacy of procedural reform efforts. They have identified inherent anti-uniformity factors that should be embraced. A consequence of the above patchwork of historical imitations and amendments is the countless procedural differences between state and federal courts across the nation. Most practicing lawyers and judges are far too busy to focus on reforming the system where they have learned to function. There is precious little time to devote to individual consideration of whether another judicial system offers a better solution to the practice at hand. On their behalf, there are numerous state and federal entities–perhaps no more so than in California–that propose intra-system or single-subject changes from time to time. But there is no ‘‘go to’’ institution with the resources to routinely canvass differences between state and federal procedure within each state. There is no evolving national database that tracks this genre of state and federal variances.[27]

An express objective of the early 20th-century reformers was to use the development of new federal procedural rules to facilitate uniformity of civil procedure in the separate states.[28] By 1959, 17 states had adopted versions of the FRCP in part or whole as their civil procedure systems. Today, 35 states have adopted versions of the FRCP to govern civil procedure in their state court systems, although significant modifications were necessary because the federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction, while state courts have general jurisdiction over innumerable types of matters that are usually beyond the jurisdiction of federal courts (traffic, family, probate, and so on). In supplementing the FRCP to provide a comprehensive set of rules appropriate to state law, several states took advantage of the opportunity to impose intrastate uniformity of civil procedure, thereby cutting down on the ability of trial court judges in rural areas to trip up big city lawyers with obscure local rules and forms, and in turn improving the portability of legal services. Even states that declined to adopt the FRCP, like California, also joined the movement towards intrastate uniformity of civil procedure.

California, Illinois and New York are notable in that almost all of their sui generis civil procedure systems are codified in statutory law, not in rules promulgated by the state supreme court or the state bar association. The position taken by these states is that to protect the rights of the citizens of a representative democracy, civil procedure should be directly managed by legislators elected by the people on a frequent basis, not judges who are subject only to relatively infrequent retention elections (California) or direct elections (Illinois and New York). (All three states have strong traditions of popular sovereignty; they are among the minority of U.S. states whose enacting clauses and criminal prosecutions are done in the name of the people, rather than the state.) The other problem with having judges manage civil procedure rules is that they are usually too busy with their regular caseloads to directly draft new or amended rules themselves. As noted above, most of the real work is delegated to appointed advisory committees.

The opposite viewpoint, as represented by the FRCP and its state counterparts (this was also an express position of the federal civil procedure reform movement), is that civil procedure is a judicial function reserved to the judiciary under the rule of separation of powers; legislatures are often too congested and gridlocked to make timely amendments to civil procedure statutes (as evidenced by the chaos and delays surrounding the statutory adoption of the Federal Rules of Evidence); and many legislators are nonlawyers who do not understand the urgent need to constantly revise and improve civil procedure rules. Thus, the development of state statutory civil procedure law is often haphazard and chaotic.[28]

Another reason for why many states have not adopted the FRCP is that they have borrowed, by occasional statutory acts, the most innovative parts of the FRCP for their civil procedure systems, while maintaining the general principle that the legislature should manage civil procedure. For example, the FRCP's liberal discovery rules heavily influenced the California Civil Discovery Act of 1957 as well as its subsequent replacements in 1986 and 2004. Thus, by fixing the most archaic and frustrating parts of their procedural systems, they have obviated the need for complete reform, which would also necessitate retraining all their lawyers and judges.

Confusingly, Kansas and North Carolina have "Rules of Civil Procedure" which are actually enacted statutes, not rules promulgated by their state supreme courts.

A few states have adopted the general principle that civil procedure should be established in court rules, not civil procedure statutes, but have refused to adopt the FRCP. For example, Rhode Island has its own Civil Court Rules of Procedure.

Generally, American civil procedure has several notable features, including extensive pretrial discovery, heavy reliance on live testimony obtained at deposition or elicited in front of a jury, and aggressive pretrial "law and motion" practice designed to result in a pretrial disposition (that is, summary judgment) or a settlement. U.S. courts pioneered the concept of the opt-out class action, by which the burden falls on class members to notify the court that they do not wish to be bound by the judgment, as opposed to opt-in class actions, where class members must join into the class. Another unique feature is the so-called American Rule under which parties generally bear their own attorneys' fees (as opposed to the English Rule of "loser pays"), though American legislators and courts have carved out numerous exceptions.

• Civil procedure

• The United States Federal Rules of Civil Procedure at the United States Courts Official Website