Definition
A rule of course is a procedural order or direction that a court authorizes its officers to issue as a matter of routine, without requiring formal application to a judge in open court. No hearing, motion argument, or judicial exercise of discretion is needed — the order issues automatically upon proper request, because its appropriateness in the given circumstance is presumed by the court's standing practice. The term captures the idea that certain procedural steps are so standard, so expected, and so uncontested in their ordinary application that the court's machinery can process them without judicial attention each time.
Rules of course are distinguished from discretionary orders, which require a judge to weigh circumstances and exercise judgment before granting relief.
Common Confusion
RULE OF COURSE vs. SIDE-BAR RULE: These terms refer to the same concept at different points in procedural history. "Side-bar rule" is the older English designation, derived from the practice of attorneys approaching the side bar of the courtroom — rather than addressing the bench — to obtain these routine orders from court clerks or officers. As English and American practice modernized, the term "rule of course" displaced "side-bar rule" as the standard label. Researchers encountering "side-bar rule" in older English reports or early American practice materials should understand it as a direct predecessor of what later sources call a rule of course.
RULE OF COURSE vs. RULE TO SHOW CAUSE: A rule to show cause requires the opposing party to appear and demonstrate why a requested order should not issue — it presupposes the possibility of opposition and requires judicial involvement. A rule of course, by contrast, issues without notice to an adverse party and without judicial deliberation. Conflating the two distorts the procedural posture of historical litigation records.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears almost exclusively in procedural contexts from English common law practice and early American courts modeling themselves on that practice. It surfaces most often in reports and treatises from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the mechanics of common law pleading — writs, rules, and the sequenced steps of bringing a case to issue — were the dominant architecture of civil litigation.
Researchers using Law Mind sources should watch for several traps. First, the term drops sharply from usage after procedural reform movements, particularly the Field Code reforms beginning in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States and the Judicature Acts in England. Modern procedural rules replaced most rules of course with codified time-limits and automatic procedures; the label itself largely disappeared. Finding the term in a post-reform source is unusual and warrants careful attention to whether an older treatise is being cited or whether the court has retained archaic terminology.
Second, the absence of judicial discretion is the operationally important feature. When a historical record shows that a party obtained a rule of course, it tells the researcher that no judge evaluated the merits or circumstances of that step — only that the procedural prerequisites were met. This matters when reconstructing litigation timelines or assessing whether a party had any meaningful opportunity to contest a procedural move.
Third, because these rules were issued by court officers rather than judges, they appear in different parts of the historical record. They may not show up in judicial opinions at all, appearing instead in clerk's books, rule books, or procedural manuals. Researchers relying solely on reported decisions may miss this layer of case history entirely.
The term has no meaningful connection to the Law Mind Contracts encyclopedia entries flagged in the source material. "Course of dealing," "course of performance," and related commercial law concepts are doctrinally and historically unrelated to procedural rules of course.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier and Black are in complete agreement on the core definition: a rule that a court's officers may grant without formal application to a judge. Neither adds significant analytical depth, which is itself informative — the term was sufficiently settled in practice that neither dictionary felt the need to elaborate.
Black's adds the more useful historical note, tracing the term's origin to the English "side-bar rule" and attributing the connection to Brown (likely William Brown's treatise on practice). That lineage is worth preserving for researchers: the term's procedural function was stable across its nomenclature shift from "side-bar rule" to "rule of course," even as the physical practice of approaching the side bar became a historical artifact.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the term's obsolescence. Neither Bouvier nor Black flags that the concept was being displaced by codified procedure even as they wrote. Researchers should not assume that the mechanics described — officers granting rules without judicial involvement — survived intact into twentieth-century practice.
Jurisdictional Note
The concept is rooted in English common law practice and migrated to American jurisdictions that modeled their procedural systems on English forms. Its relevance is primarily historical across all jurisdictions. Modern American federal and state procedural codes have largely replaced the functional equivalent with explicit rule-based automatic procedures, rendering the term itself archaic in current practice.