Definition
"For good cause" is a legal standard requiring that a party demonstrate a sufficient, legitimate, and non-frivolous reason to justify a requested deviation from ordinary procedural rules, contractual terms, or statutory requirements. It is an intentionally flexible threshold — neither as demanding as "good cause shown" in constitutional contexts nor as permissive as mere convenience or preference — that delegates evaluative discretion to the decision-maker.
The phrase appears across three distinct legal contexts, each carrying a somewhat different operational weight:
1. Procedural context: A court, agency, or tribunal may grant relief from a deadline, rule, or order "for good cause." This includes continuances, extensions of time, relief from default, and amended filings. The standard requires the requesting party to show genuine need, typically involving circumstances outside their control or reasonable diligence despite failure.
2. Employment and contractual context: "For good cause" (or "for good cause shown") defines permissible grounds for termination, removal, or cancellation of an agreement. In employment law, it functions as a protective floor — the employer must identify a legitimate, documented, work-related reason for adverse action. In contracts, it may define the conditions under which one party may exit without liability.
3. Administrative and regulatory context: Agencies may invoke a "good cause" exemption to bypass standard notice-and-comment rulemaking when such procedures are impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest. This use of the phrase carries its own distinct analytical framework.
Common Confusion
"For good cause" is frequently conflated with two adjacent standards that impose different burdens. "Probable cause" is a constitutional standard in criminal and Fourth Amendment contexts — objectively grounded in articulable facts — and is not interchangeable with the procedural or employment uses of "good cause." "Just cause" is used in labor law and collective bargaining agreements as a term of art with its own body of arbitral precedent; it typically implies a more structured multi-factor inquiry than "good cause" in general procedural usage. Researchers should not assume the standards are equivalent when a source uses one or the other.
Core Elements
In procedural contexts, courts and agencies evaluating whether "good cause" exists generally examine:
- Reason for the failure or need: Was there excusable neglect, genuine emergency, or a circumstance beyond the party's control?
- Diligence: Did the party act reasonably and promptly given the circumstances?
- Prejudice to the opposing party: Would granting the request unfairly disadvantage the other side?
- Effect on the proceeding: Does granting relief serve or undermine orderly administration of the case?
These factors are not a rigid checklist; weight shifts depending on the procedural posture and the governing rule or statute.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "for good cause" is a chameleon — it appears in procedural rules, statutes, contracts, and administrative codes, but the operative standard it establishes shifts meaningfully by context. A researcher reading a 19th-century case about continuances and one reading a modern employment termination dispute may both encounter this phrase, but they are looking at fundamentally different legal tests rooted in different bodies of doctrine.
In historical sources, "for good cause" most often appears in procedural contexts — motions for continuance, postponement of proceedings, and removal of officers — where courts held the showing required to be contextual and fact-specific rather than rule-bound. Researchers should be cautious about importing historical procedural case law into modern employment or administrative law analysis; the term migrated into those domains later and carries independent doctrinal baggage.
In administrative law, the "good cause" exemption from notice-and-comment rulemaking under the federal Administrative Procedure Act developed a substantial body of case law in the 20th century that is entirely absent from 19th-century sources. Bouvier's entries will not illuminate this usage.
For employment law, the phrase's meaning is often determined by the specific contract language, statutory framework, or arbitral tradition at issue — not by general common law definitions. Researchers working in labor and employment should treat "good cause" as jurisdiction- and instrument-specific and verify the applicable standard in the governing source.
Cross-corpus alert: The word "cause" appears throughout the Law Mind corpus in entirely unrelated senses — including "cause of action," "proximate cause," and "actual cause" in tort and criminal law. None of these uses are related to "for good cause" as a procedural or contractual standard.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary addresses "for good cause" narrowly and instrumentally, noting its application in continuance statutes. The key passage observes that a statute authorizing a continuance "for good cause" in the absence of a party is satisfied by proof of the plaintiff's illness in another state combined with the attorney's ignorance of witness names and case details — illustrating how courts treated the standard as a factual, totality-of-circumstances inquiry rather than a categorical rule.
Equally significant is Bouvier's candid observation that "for good cause" "has no certain meaning in a stipulation for canceling a contract." This is a rare and valuable admission in a 19th-century legal dictionary: the phrase is acknowledged as genuinely indeterminate in contractual context, with the meaning left to be supplied by surrounding circumstances and the parties' intent. Researchers should treat this observation as a persistent truth — modern courts in contract disputes still resist pinning down a universal definition.
Bouvier does not address the administrative law usage of "good cause" at all, which is expected given the pre-APA period of the source. This is a significant gap for 20th- and 21st-century administrative law research.
Jurisdictional Note
Procedural "good cause" standards vary across federal and state systems. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 6(b) and related rules govern extensions of time and use "good cause" and "excusable neglect" as distinct but related standards. State courts often apply analogous but not identical standards. In employment law, states with "good cause" termination statutes — such as Montana under its Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act — establish specific statutory definitions that control over common law formulations.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia: Exemptions from Rulemaking — Good Cause, Interpretive Rules, Policy Statements (admin_14) — directly relevant to the APA "good cause" exemption from notice-and-comment rulemaking.