Monday, April 6, 2015

Noll's Guide to Civil Procedure before the FRCP

For every teacher of Property, Contracts or Torts whoever hoped but was not quite sure that the Civil Procedure professor has covered common-law pleading, David L. Noll, Rutgers-Newark Law, has posted A Reader's Guide to Pre-Modern Procedure:
This short essay fills a minor but consequential gap in the civil procedure literature. Many sources describe the general badness of procedural systems that predated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure but few describe how those systems actually worked. This essay — intended as a reference for law students, law professors, and anyone else required to read and make sense of archaic judicial opinions — does just that.