Definition
A prayer for process is the concluding portion of a bill in equity in which the complainant requests that the court issue process — typically a subpoena or writ — compelling the defendant to appear and answer the allegations set forth in the bill. It is one of the formal structural components of an equity pleading, distinct from the charging part of the bill (which sets out the facts) and from the prayer for relief (which requests the substantive remedy sought). The prayer for process functions as the jurisdictional hook that triggers the court's coercive authority over the defendant's person: without it, the court has no formal basis to compel appearance.
In traditional equity practice, the bill in chancery followed a fixed sequence of parts, and the prayer for process was the last of them. Its presence signaled that the complainant was not merely presenting a petition for voluntary action but was invoking the court's compulsory powers.
Common Confusion
The prayer for process is frequently conflated with the prayer for relief (also called the "general prayer" or "special prayer"). These are distinct components of an equity bill. The prayer for relief asks what the court should do — grant an injunction, compel specific performance, order an accounting. The prayer for process asks the court to bring the defendant before it so that relief can be pursued at all. One addresses remedy; the other addresses compulsion of appearance. Researchers encountering older equity pleadings should verify which prayer is being discussed, as the two are sometimes loosely referenced together in secondary literature.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is encountered almost exclusively in the context of historical equity pleading. With the merger of law and equity courts in federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938) and the subsequent adoption of notice pleading, the formal prayer for process as a distinct pleading element disappeared from American practice. A researcher examining pre-merger equity pleadings — chancery records, circuit court equity dockets, or state equity practice before code pleading reforms — will encounter this term as a technical term of art.
The key research trap is anachronism: applying post-merger expectations to pre-merger documents. A bill that lacks a separately labeled prayer for process may have been defective under the rules of the relevant equity court, or the omission may have been excused by local practice. The significance of the component varied by jurisdiction and era.
Researchers working in state court records from jurisdictions that maintained separate equity courts into the twentieth century — including several southern states — will encounter this term more frequently than those focused on early-adopting code pleading states. The term also appears in treatises on equity pleading that postdate its practical obsolescence, where it is discussed descriptively as part of the structure of the traditional bill.
Corpus connections: because this is a structural term rather than a substantive doctrine, it tends to appear in pleading manuals, equity treatises, and court form books rather than in judicial opinions discussing doctrine. Researchers should look to practice guides and procedural treatises of the relevant period rather than case law reporters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence define the prayer for process as "a prayer or petition with which a bill in equity" concludes, requesting the issuance of compulsory process against the defendant. The entry is brief, consistent with the term's status as a technical procedural label rather than a contested legal concept. The definition accurately captures the function: it is a formal request, attached to an equity bill, for the court's coercive machinery.
Historical dictionaries uniformly treat this as an unambiguous term of art. There is no meaningful divergence across sources. What the historical dictionaries do not address — because they were written when equity pleading was still live practice — is the term's obsolescence and the research challenges that follow from it. Modern legal dictionaries largely omit the term entirely, reflecting the post-merger world in which the formal components of an equity bill are of historical rather than practical interest.
Jurisdictional Note
The prayer for process as a formal pleading requirement was a feature of English chancery practice transplanted to American equity courts. Its importance varied by jurisdiction depending on whether and when a state adopted code pleading or, later, rules modeled on the Federal Rules. In states that early adopted Field Code pleading (New York, 1848, and its followers), the formal equity bill structure — and with it the prayer for process as a distinct component — was replaced by the civil complaint before the federal merger occurred.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Due Process of Law — Substantive Due Process Origins and Framework (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia) [background on procedural dimensions of court process and compulsion of appearance]