RULE - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

RULEAuthored

The Law Mind • 1319 words

Definition

RULE carries three distinct legal meanings that researchers must keep separate depending on context:

Procedural order. An order made by a court directed at the parties to a specific action or proceeding. In this sense, a rule is a command issued between parties—either on a party's motion or by the court sua sponte—requiring some act or response. It is distinguishable from a judgment and from a general standing order. A rule to show cause, for example, directs a party to appear and explain why a particular relief should not be granted.

Court rule (rule of court). A general regulation governing practice and procedure before a court, applicable to all litigants. These are prospective, legislative in character, and typically issued by a court under authority delegated by statute or constitution. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Federal Rules of Evidence, and state equivalents are the modern exemplars.

Legal rule or principle. A stated legal standard derived from statute, common law, or judicial decision that governs a class of situations. In this sense, rule is synonymous with doctrine or principle: the rule against perpetuities, the rule in Shelley's Case, the exclusionary rule.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A regulation, law, or guideline; a regulating principle; also, the act of governing or the normal state of affairs.

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): That which is prescribed or laid down as a guide for conduct or action; a governing direction; an authoritative enactment; a prescription or precept.

The gap between common and legal usage is narrower here than with many legal terms, but it is real. In ordinary English, rule suggests a directive that is ongoing and general—a standing norm of behavior. In legal practice, rule frequently means something narrower and more transient: a court's specific procedural command to named parties in a pending matter. A researcher who reads "the court issued a rule" and assumes the court published a procedural regulation rather than ordered a specific party to act will misread the document.

Common Confusion

Rule (procedural order) vs. Order vs. Judgment: These three terms describe different levels of a court's commands. A judgment is the court's final determination on the merits. An order is a broad term for any court direction. A rule, in traditional usage, often designated a specific subspecies of order—particularly one requiring a party to show cause or comply with a procedure—and was distinguished from a judge's order in that rules were entered of record as acts of the court rather than of an individual judge. This distinction has largely collapsed in modern federal practice, where "order" subsumes most of what older sources called rules. Researchers reading pre-twentieth-century materials must not equate historical "rule" with modern "order" without considering the technical distinction.

Rule vs. Regulation: In administrative law contexts, rule and regulation are often interchangeable, but federal administrative procedure gives "rule" a specific statutory definition encompassing agency statements of general or particular applicability designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy. Not every agency directive is a rule in that formal sense.

Recognized Forms

/SUBTYPES

Rule absolute: A rule that takes immediate effect without condition; the party has no further opportunity to respond or show cause before it binds.

Rule nisi (rule to show cause): A conditional rule that becomes absolute unless the named party appears by a specified date and demonstrates cause why it should not. Common in older equity and common law practice; the form survives in some jurisdictions for contempt and summary proceedings.

Rule of court (general rule): A standing procedural regulation applicable to all proceedings before a court, as opposed to a rule issued between parties in a specific case.

Rule in [named case]: A common law doctrine named for the case that established it. The Rule in Shelley's Case and the Rule in Wild's Case are classic examples. These are substantive legal rules, not procedural commands.

Rule of decision: The body of law—whether statutory or common law—that a court applies to determine the merits of a controversy.

Why It Matters in Research

The three meanings of rule operate simultaneously in historical legal sources, and the appropriate meaning is rarely flagged. A court reporter's headnote reading "rule discharged" refers to a procedural order being dissolved, not a legal doctrine being overturned. "The court ruled" is the verb form signifying a decision on a point of law (Anderson's sense 1), while "a rule was entered" signals a procedural command (Burrill's sense). Conflating these produces systematic misreading.

For corpus researchers: the term's density increases sharply in equity and common law procedural records, where rules nisi and rules absolute were workhorse mechanisms. Modern materials have largely replaced this vocabulary with "order to show cause" and "order," so frequency analysis across historical and modern layers of the corpus will show false discontinuity unless the shift in terminology is accounted for.

Rules of court as a distinct category matter for tracing procedural history. The transition from court-made general rules to legislatively authorized procedural codes (culminating in the Federal Rules of 1938) is a major legal historical event. Pre-1938 federal procedural materials governed by equity rules and common law practice look very different from post-1938 materials; both will use the word rule, but the institutional context differs fundamentally.

The named-case rule (Rule in Shelley's Case, etc.) requires entirely different research strategy: these are common law doctrines with independent bodies of commentary, and their abolition or retention varies sharply by jurisdiction.

Historical Dictionary Support

Burrill provides the most precise historical treatment: a rule is an order made by a court for regulation of its practice (a general rule) or an order made between parties in an action, with a specific note that a rule of court is distinguished from a judge's order. This distinction—between an act of the court as an institution and an act of an individual judge—was technically important in older practice and explains why older court records differentiate between the two.

Bouvier is spare: "a regulation or formula to which conduct must be conformed," pointing to the normative sense without addressing the procedural dimension at all.

Anderson adds the verb sense explicitly: to rule is to hold, decide, or lay down; to overrule is to decide contrary to a prior case or to reject a motion. This verb sense is pervasive in judicial opinions and should not be confused with the noun's procedural meaning.

Rapalje & Lawrence, in the accessible fragment, cross-references the Rule in Shelley's Case without independent definition, signaling that named-case rules were treated as discrete doctrinal entries rather than subsumed under a general definition of rule.

Black's 2nd Edition does not appear in the available fragments for this term directly; the sourced excerpt concerns royalty. Historical dictionary support for Black's must therefore be noted as absent from the provided materials.

What historical dictionaries collectively miss: the administrative law sense of rule as a formal agency pronouncement did not exist as a distinct category in the era of these dictionaries. Researchers working with twentieth-century regulatory materials will find no guidance in Bouvier or Burrill on that usage.

Jurisdictional Note

The procedural rule/order distinction survives more visibly in state court practice than in federal court, where the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have standardized vocabulary around "order." Some states retain specific rule-based mechanisms (rules to show cause in contempt proceedings, for example) as formally distinct from general motions practice. The Rule in Shelley's Case has been abolished by statute in most American jurisdictions but remains relevant in a handful of states and for construing older instruments.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Procedural Orders and Court Practice; Rule Against Perpetuities; Administrative Rulemaking.

RULEmain

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910

. ROYALTY. <A payment reserved by the grantor of a patent, lease of a mine, or similar right, and payable proportionately to the use made of the right by the grantee. See Raynolds v. Hanna (C. ©.) 55 Fed. 800; Hubenthal v. Kennedy, 76 Iowa, 707, 38 N. W. 694; Western Union Tel. Co. v. American Bell Tel. Co., 125 Fed. 342, 60 ©. C. A. 220. Royalty also sometimes means a payment which is made to an author or composer by an assignee or licensee in respect of each copy of his work which is sold, or to an inventor in respect of each article sold und the patent. Sweet. . 7 - RUBRIC. Directions printed in books of law and in prayer-books, so termed because they were originally distinguished by red ink. —Rubric of a statute. Its title, which was anciently printed in red letters. It serves to show the object of the legislature, and thence affords the means of interpreting the bedy of the act; hence the phrase, of an argument, “e rubro ad nigrum.” harton. court, in relation to practice, etc—Rule absolute. One which commands the subject-matter of the rule to be forthwith enforced. It is usual, when the party has failed to show sufficient cause against a rule nisi, to “make the rule absolute,” ¢. ¢, imperative and final.— Rule-day. In practice. The day on which 4 rule is returnable, or on which the act or duty enjoined by a rule is to be performed. See Cook v. Cook, 18 Fla. 687.—Rule in Shelley’s Case. A celebrated rule in English law, ropounded in Lord Coke’s reports in the folowlng form: ‘That whenever a man, by an gift or conveyance, takes an estate of freehold, and in the same gift or conveyance an estate is limited, either mediately or immediately, to his heirs in fee or in tail, the word “heirs” is a word of limitation and not of purchase. In other words, it is to be understood as expressing the quantity of estate which the party is to take, and not as conferring any distinct estate on the persons who may become his representatives. 1 Coke, 104a; 1 Steph. C See Zabriskie v. Wood, 23 N. J. Eq. 544; Duf:- fy v. Jarvis (C. C.) 84 Fed. 733; Hampton vy. ther, 30 Miss. 203; Hancock v. Butler, 21 Tex. 807 ; Rogers v. Rogers, 3 Wend. 511. 20 Am. Dec. 716; Smith v. Smith. 24 8. C. 314. —Rule nisi. <A rule which will become imperative and final unless cause be shown against it. This rule commands the party to show caus why he should not be compelled to do the ac required, or why the object of the rule should not be enforced —Rule of 1756. A rule of international law, first practically established in 17586, by which neutrals, in time of war, are prohibited from carrying on with a belligerent power a trade which is not open to them in time of peace. 1 Kent. Comm. 82.—Rale of course. There are some rules which the courts authorize their officers to grant as a matter of course, without formal application being made to a judge in open court, and these are technically termed, in English practice, “‘side-bar rules,” because formerly they were moved for by the attorneys at the side bar in court. They are now generally termed “rules of course. Brown.—Rules of court. The rules for reguJating the practice of the different courts, which the judges are empowered to frame and put in force as occasion may require, are termed “rules of court.” Brown. See Goodlett v. Charles, 14 Rich. Law (S. C.) 49.—Rale of Yaw. A legal principle, of general application, sanctioned by the recognition of authorities, and usually expressed in the form of a maxim or logical proposition... Called a “rule,” because in doubtful or unforeseen cases it is a guide or norm fe: their decision. Toullier, tit. prel. no. 17.—Rules of practice. Certain orders made by the courts for the purpose of regulating the practice in actions and other proceedings before them—Rules of procedure. Rules made by a legislative body concerning the mode and manner of conducting its business, and for the purpose of making an orderly and proper disposition of the matters before it, suc: as rules prescribing what committees shall be appointed. on what subjects they shall act, what shall be the daily order in which business shall be taken up, and in what order certain motions shall be received and acted on. Heiskell v. Baltimore, 65 Md. 125, 4 Atl. 116, 57 Am. Rep. 308; Hevker v. McLaughlin, 1lu0 Ky. 509, 50 S. W. 859.—Rule of property. A settled rule or principle, resting usually on precedents or a course of decisions, regulating the ownership or devolution of property. Yazoo & M. V. R. Co. v. Adams, 81 Miss. 90, 32 South. 937: ‘Edwards v. Davenport (C. C.) 20 Fed. 763.—Rule of the road. The popular English name for the regulations governing the navigation of vessels: in public waters with a view to preventing collisions. Sweet.—Rule be lead. <A rule of court, taken by a plainti of eourse, requiring the defendant to plead

RULEmain

Rapalje & Lawrence • 1888

3. Witness. When a person called as a witness in a judicial proceeding either refuses from conscientious motives, or is unable from want of religious belief, to take an oath, he makes a solemn affirmation or declaration that he will speak the truth; if he wilfully and corruptly gives false evidence he is liable to punishment for perjury as if he had taken an oath. Best Ev. 236. See DECLARATION. AFFIRM, (as applied to a decree). 14 Wend. (Ν.Υ.) 666. - (as used in a deposition). South. (N.J.) (in statute authorizing Quakers to). 9 298. Masa, 108, 111. AFFRAY.-The fighting of two or more persons in a public place to the terror of the people. If the fight take place in a private place it is not an affray but an assault, (q. v.) See RIOT; UNLAWFUL

RULEmain

Rapalje & Lawrence • 1883

(1139) ROYAL GRANTS.-Conveyances of direction made by a court of justice in an record, in England. They are of two kinds: action or other proceeding. The term is (1) Letters-patent, and (2) letters-close, or writsclose. 1 Steph. Com. (7 edit.) 615-618.

RULEn.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

That which is prescribed or laid down as a guide for conduct or action; a governing direction for a specific purpose; an authoritative enactment; a regulation; a prescription; a precept; as, the rules of various societies; the rules governing a school; a rule of etiquette or propriety; the rules of cricket. We profess to have embraced a religion which contains the most exact rules for the government of our lives. Tillotson. Hence: Uniform or established course of things. 'T is against the rule of nature. Shak. Systematic method or practice; as, my ule is to rise at six o'clock. Ordibary course of procedure; usual way; comon state or condition of things; as, it is a rule to which there are many exeptions. Conduct in general; behavior. [Obs.] This uncivil rule; she shall know of it. Shak. The act of ruling; administration of law; government; empire; authority; control. Obey them that have the rule over you. Heb. xiii. 17. His stern rule the groaning land obeyed. Pope. An order regulating the practice of the courts, or an order made between parties to an action or a suit. Wharton. A determinate method prescribed for performing any operation and producing a certain result; as, a rule for extracting the cube root. A general principle concerning the formation or use of words, or a concise statement thereof; thus, it is a rule in England, that s or es , added to a noun in the singular number, forms the plural of that noun; but "man" forms its plural "men", and is an exception to the rule. A straight strip of wood, metal, or the like, which serves as a guide in drawing a straight line; a ruler. A measuring instrument consisting of a graduated bar of wood, ivory, metal, or the like, which is usually marked so as to show inches and fractions of an inch, and jointed so that it may be folded compactly. A judicious artist will use his eye, but he will trust only to his rule. South. A thin plate of metal (usually brass) of the same height as the type, and used for printing lines, as between columns on the same page, or in tabular work. A composing rule. See under Conposing. As a rule, as a general thing; in the main; usually; as, he behaves well, as a rule.  -- Board rule, Caliber rule,etc. See under Board, Caliber, etc.  -- Rule joint, a knuckle joint having shoulders that abut when the connected pieces come in line with each other, and thus permit folding in one direction only.  -- Rule of three (Arith.), that rule which directs, when three terms are given, how to find a fourth, which shall have the same ratio to the third term as the second has to the first; proportion. See Proportion, 5 (b).  -- Rule of thumb, any rude process or operation, like that of using the thumb as a rule in measuring; hence, judgment and practical experience as distinguished from scientific knowledge.

RULEv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To control the will and actions of; to exercise authority or dominion over; to govern; to manage. Chaucer. A bishop then must be blameless; . . . one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection. 1 Tim. iii. 2, 4. To control or direct by influence, counsel, or persuasion; to guide; -- used chiefly in the passive. I think she will be ruled In all respects by me. Shak. To establish or settle by, or as by, a rule; to fix by universal or general consent, or by common practice. That's are ruled case with the schoolmen. Atterbury. To require or command by rule; to give as a direction or order of court. To mark with lines made with a pen, pencil, etc., guided by a rule or ruler; to print or mark with lines by means of a rule or other contrivance effecting a similar result; as, to rule a sheet of paper of a blank book. Ruled surface (Geom.), any surface that may be described by a straight line moving according to a given law; -- called also a scroll.

RULEv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To have power or command; to exercise supreme authority; -- often followed by over. By me princes rule, and nobles. Prov. viii. 16. We subdue and rule over all other creatures. Ray. To lay down and settle a rule or order of court; to decide an incidental point; to enter a rule. Burril. Bouvier. To keep within a (certain) range for a time; to be in general, or as a rule; as, prices ruled lower yesterday than the day before.

rulenoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

A regulation, law, guideline. | A regulating principle. | The act of ruling; administration of law; government; empire; authority; control. | A normal condition or state of affairs. | Conduct; behaviour. | An order regulating the practice of the courts, or an order made between parties to an action or a suit. | A determinate method prescribed for performing any operation and producing a certain result. | A ruler; device for measuring, a straightedge, a measure. | A straight line (continuous mark, as made by a pen or the like), especially one lying across a paper as a guide for writing. | A thin plate of brass or other metal, of the same height as the type, and used for printing lines, as between columns on the same page, or in tabular work.

ruleverb

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

To regulate, be in charge of, make decisions for, reign over. | To excel. | To decide judicially. | To establish or settle by, or as by, a rule; to fix by universal or general consent, or by common practice. | To mark (paper or the like) with rules (lines).

rulenoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Revelry.

Explore the full Law Mind legal research platform.

Subscribe Encyclopedia Sign In