Amendments to pleadings

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Revision as of 20:22, 4 November 2010

Amending the pleadings is treated in FRCP Rule 15.

Because the pleadings are the foundation for an action and have great impact on the final disposition of an action, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure take a very liberal attitude toward amending the pleadings. Rule 15 allows amendments before trial, during trial, and even after trial. A party may always amend its pleading once as a matter of course before being served with a responsive pleading. After that, whether to allow an amendment is at the trial judge’s discretion, but Rule 15(a)(2) directs her to do so “freely when justice so requires.” The ability to amend is important, because once a statement is put in a pleading it is a judicial admission and cannot be denied in front of a jury unless the pleading party receives leave to amend, unlike an evidentiary admission, which is not binding and can be denied at trial.

David v. Crompton & Knowles Corp. (1973) emphasized this liberalness, holding that a judge should allow amendment except under a small number of circumstances. The Crompton court recognized two exceptions where amendments should not be allowed. First, the court should look to whether an amendment would prejudice the parties. In Crompton, the defendant discovered that it was the wrong party to be sued, but did not find this out until after the statute of limitations had expired for the plaintiff to sue the correct party. The court noted that if the amendment were allowed, the plaintiff would be highly prejudiced in that he would not be able to pursue the action. The defendant would also have been prejudiced by not allowing the amendment, since it was not actually liable to the plaintiff, but the court decided that the defendant would be less prejudiced under those circumstances.

Second, the Crompton court noted that an amendment should not be allowed if there was undue delay before the motion. It reasoned that a party stalled the proceedings should not benefit from such an action.

There are four tests for amendments, but two were not considered in the Crompton decision. The third is to look for fault. When an amendment is contentious and could alter the nature of an action, the court tries to determine whose responsibility it is that the case is in such a situation. Like prejudice, courts will look at comparative fault.

Finally, the fourth test is futility. Simply, would an amendment make any difference? For example, a plaintiff might seek to amend her complaint to add more defendants, but if the statute of limitations has already expired then those new defendants could immediately bring a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. This would be a waste of the court’s resources, and a futile amendment.

Liberalness with amendments goes back to the basic premise of notice pleading, that we want cases tried on the merits. (See Pleadings, Generally). As such, pleadings can be amended at almost any time, subject to the four tests. As mentioned earlier, pleadings can even be amended after judgment.

The standard of review on a judge’s decision in this context is abuse of discretion. Abuse of discretion is difficult to define, and essentially means that the trial judge has a great amount of discretion, and that her decision is unlikely to be reversed by an appellate court. It would not be efficient for the appellate courts to second-guess the managerial decisions of the trial judges, lest appellate caseloads mushroom. The parties’ job, then, is to persuade the judge toward their points of view.