Murphy's law

Personally I love rules. A rule that has a reasonable purpose, accomplishes it simply, and blends with a system of other rules gives me a sense of order and peacefulness, like a rosy-fingered dawn.



Most rules, however, won’t inspire Homeric images. Even so, I have seldom met a court rule I couldn’t follow – assuming I had the time and resources and could call a few friends.



There is an infinite variety of ways to do things. The function of “rules” is to have agreement on one for the sake of order.



It may be sensible, for instance, to require that briefs have page limits that vary according to typeface, or require documents to be filed either by hand delivery, mailing, mailing plus postal forms or mailing so long as it gets there on time. Compliance is not hard once a rule is settled on and made known.



When the many courts that layer modern law practice select subtly different ways for structuring a brief or filing a document, however, a human factors expert might raise an eyebrow.



Although every court makes sure its own rules work well, there may be no one factoring the potential for confusion from the combination of all rules of all courts.

In a Macrocosm

In Pennsylvania there are 67 counties, three separate state appeals courts, three federal districts and a federal court of appeals embracing the geography of three states and a few Carribean islands.



Many attorneys near the border with other states are admitted in those jurisdictions, too. The rules of all these courts differ, although the basic briefing and filing rules for the Supreme, Superior and Commonwealth Courts of Pennsylvania are luckily uniform.



In respect to our common pleas courts, the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts is placing on its Web site (www.aopc.org) links that will allow access to what seems to be a growing body of local county rules. The need for such ready access to these rules is as clear as their sheer size and diversity.



A lawyer in the Pennsylvania unified system could foreseeably be in any of 67 counties. Each court may have its own internally reasonable way of doing everything not preempted by state rule. If you had a map showing all the different rules, you’d need quite a few push pins.



Local rules that are highly specific and detailed give a temporary advantage of convenience to local attorneys who use them all the time. Learning them can seem like an initiation rite to “outsiders” and a natural deterrent to practicing in many counties.



West’s year 2000 text on local rules for Pennsylvania’s common pleas courts in the central region alone is almost 800 pages long. Needless to say, the vast majority of counties have their own set of written rules of civil procedure and other rules. They are not all mirror images of each other and can vary in slight details, making inter-county practice a challenge.



There is an occasional oasis, however. My copy of West’s Pennsylvania Local Court Rules (Central Region) shows no local civil procedure rules at all for Centre County. I haven’t had the privilege to practice in Centre County yet, but I am hoping that this lack of written local rules means the state procedural rules are enough by themselves. If that is the case, I’m ready to go.



Maybe you will never meet a rule that’s impossible to follow when viewed alone, but the quantity and assortment of rules taken together may still make it less likely that you will follow all of them successfully.



The Internet may well prove helpful in handling a great diversity of local rules. Dot-com technology, however, is also a temptation. It may camouflage a drift away from simple uniformity, the essence of any practical system of rules, and just make it harder to avoid the bad consequences of missing some nuance.

Unnecessary Complexity