|
|
|
|
|
Advocating for the Elimination Or Streamlining of Local Rules
YL Editorial Board
There are 67 counties in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. From Adams County to York County and from Erie County in the northwest corner of the state to Philadelphia County in Southeastern Pennsylvania, all 67 counties have their own sets of local court rules (including a few sets of shared local rules between neighbooring counties) by which we need to abide.
Certainly, state civil procedure is governed by the Pennsylvania Rules of Civil Procedure, but these are mere starting points. The Pennsylvania Rules do not inform you that filing something as mundane as a motion to compel discovery in Philadelphia County differs considerably from the same action in neighboring Montgomery County, much less how to file them.
Since the early half of the 19th century, local courts in the state have been authorized by statutes to promulgate their own set of rules, so long as those rules were not inconsistent with state law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has continued to allow local courts to tailor their own rules. Sure, the court system is now supposedly organized in a "Unified Judicial System" — as boldly claimed by the state's official court Web site — but civil procedure and court rules still vary considerably from county to county. Because state law and the state rules of civil procedure fail to provide specific guidance in many instances, counties have developed rather extensive and independent local rules. Rather than merely enhancing the Pennsylvania Rules of Civil Procedure, however, many counties have local rules that are hundreds of pages long and contain unique procedural requirements.
And these court rules are not necessarily easy to find. There is no known publication (at least publicly and readily available) that codifies all the local court rules into one big book or binder. Many of these local court rules have yearly updates, but the updates are not typically incorporated into a revised and published version of the rules.
While the Unified Judicial System Web site has links to most county local rules, it is often difficult to ascertain whether one has found the most current version of a rule. The primary version of each county's local rules were scanned into the system in 1998, and the updates or rule revisions are uploaded as separate files without a corresponding revision to the primary version. There a ...
|
The article you have selected is only available to registered users.
Simply register below. It's free, fast, and easy,
plus you'll get access to all of the other articles on the site! |
|
|
| |
|
|
