Definition
A bill for new trial is an equitable proceeding filed in a court of equity after a party has suffered an adverse judgment in a court of law. The losing party files the bill asking a court of equity to enjoin enforcement of the law court's judgment on the ground that facts exist which, in conscience, make it unjust to allow that judgment to stand. The remedy is not a direct appeal within the law court system but rather a separate equitable action seeking to restrain the victorious party from executing on or otherwise enforcing the judgment.
The equitable intervention rests on a core limitation: the complainant must show either (1) that the facts now relied upon were genuinely unavailable at the time of the law court proceedings, or (2) that the complainant was prevented from presenting those facts by fraud, accident, surprise, or some other cause that equity recognizes as sufficient to excuse the failure. A party who simply failed to present available evidence, or who seeks a second chance to re-litigate a matter fully and fairly tried, will find no relief here. Equity acts on the conscience; it does not function as a safety net for negligent litigation.
Common Confusion
The bill for new trial is easily confused with a motion for new trial, which is the familiar procedural device filed within the same court and the same action after verdict. The motion for new trial is a creature of law court practice (and, in modern systems, of the rules of civil procedure); it is addressed to the same tribunal that rendered the judgment. The bill for new trial, by contrast, initiates a wholly separate action in equity and is addressed to a different court—the court of chancery or its successor. This distinction was legally significant in any era when law and equity courts were administered separately, and it explains why historical sources treat the bill as an independent form of equitable relief rather than a phase of the original lawsuit.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
The bill for new trial historically appeared in two principal situations, each turning on the reason equity intervened:
1. After-Discovered Evidence: Facts material to the outcome came to light only after judgment, and the complainant could not with reasonable diligence have discovered them in time for the law proceeding.
2. Prevention by Fraud or Accident: The complainant possessed the facts or the means to produce them but was prevented from doing so—by the opposing party's fraud, by accident, by surprise, or by the misconduct of counsel or a witness—without fault on the complainant's own part.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a marker of historical procedural architecture. Researchers encountering it in primary sources from the eighteenth or nineteenth century are seeing evidence of the dual court system—law courts and equity courts operating as distinct tribunals—that shaped Anglo-American litigation until the procedural reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Several research traps deserve attention:
Terminology shift. After the merger of law and equity in American federal courts (Field Code era in many states, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 1938 at the federal level), the bill for new trial as a discrete procedural form largely disappeared. The same functional need—relief from a judgment on account of newly discovered evidence or fraud—was absorbed into consolidated post-judgment motions (motions for new trial, motions to vacate under what became Rule 60(b), and independent actions in equity to set aside judgments). A researcher finding the phrase in post-merger sources should treat it as either a historical reference, a surviving usage in a jurisdiction that was slow to merge, or a loose description of what is technically a different modern device.
Relationship to bill of review. The bill for new trial and the bill of review both address equitable relief from judgments, but they are not the same. The bill of review was the proper equity instrument to correct errors of law apparent on the face of the record; the bill for new trial addressed facts outside the record. Conflating them in historical research produces misreadings of judicial reasoning.
Corpus connections. Historical equity practice materials, chancery reports, and early American treatises on equity pleading are the richest sources. Researchers in jurisdictions with separate equity court records (Delaware being the most prominent surviving example) should look to chancery filings directly. For the transitional period, treatises by Story and Mitford on equity pleading discuss the bill for new trial in terms that illuminate how courts policed the line between genuine equitable intervention and mere relitigation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the bill for new trial as a bill in equity filed after judgment against the complainant in an action at law, praying for an injunction to restrain enforcement of the judgment on the ground that facts exist which render it against conscience to enforce it, with the further condition that those facts were either unavailable to the complainant in the law court or that he was prevented from availing himself of them.
This definition captures the essential structure accurately. What it leaves implicit—and what researchers should supply from context—is the stringency of the equity court's scrutiny. Historical chancery practice made clear that the bill for new trial was not an ordinary remedy. Courts of equity were acutely aware that granting relief too readily would undermine the finality of law court judgments, a concern that produced restrictive doctrine around what counted as adequate excuse for a party's failure to present the relevant facts at law. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry, brief as it is, reflects the standard late-nineteenth-century doctrinal position; it does not address how individual jurisdictions varied in their willingness to grant the injunction or how the defense of laches operated against a complainant who delayed filing.
Jurisdictional Note
In states that retain a formal equity court or equity jurisdiction distinct from law (Delaware is the primary modern example), the conceptual framework of the bill for new trial retains analytical relevance even where the precise form has evolved. In fully merged jurisdictions, its functional successors are Rule 60(b) motions and independent equitable actions to set aside judgments; researchers should trace doctrine through those modern forms when working in merged-system courts.