Definition
Rules of practice are orders, directives, or regulations established by a court to govern the conduct of proceedings before it. They prescribe the methods, forms, and procedures by which litigants, counsel, and court officers are expected to conduct business — from filing deadlines and motion practice to courtroom decorum and scheduling requirements.
Rules of practice operate at several levels:
1. Court-promulgated local rules. Standing orders and local rules adopted by an individual court or judicial district to supplement (and in some respects specify) broader procedural frameworks. These bind all litigants appearing before that court.
2. General rules of procedure. Rules issued by a higher authority — a supreme court, legislature, or rulemaking body — that govern practice across an entire judicial system. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are the paradigmatic modern example.
3. Administrative practice rules. In the regulatory context, rules of practice govern proceedings before administrative agencies and tribunals. Federal agencies typically publish their rules of practice in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The common thread across all three meanings is that rules of practice address how proceedings are conducted, not the substantive law that governs outcomes.
Common Confusion
Rules of practice are frequently conflated with rules of procedure and rules of evidence, but the terms occupy different conceptual space. Rules of procedure is the broader, modern umbrella term — it encompasses everything from pleading standards to appellate timelines. Rules of practice historically referred more specifically to court-made standing orders for managing courtroom business, as distinguished from legislatively enacted procedural codes. Rules of evidence govern admissibility of proof, a distinct category. In older sources, the three categories blur; a researcher encountering "rules of practice" in a nineteenth-century treatise should not assume the author means what a modern practitioner would call "local rules."
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "rules of practice" is a historical term of art that has largely been absorbed by the modern vocabulary of "procedural rules" and "local rules." Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century materials — particularly in equity and chancery practice — will encounter "rules of practice" as the standard term where modern sources would say "standing orders" or "local rules." The shift matters because older rules of practice were often unwritten, judge-specific, and not systematically published. Finding them requires looking to bar association records, court minute books, and treatise commentary rather than any official compilation.
The Bouvier fragment raises a critical research point: courts were understood to have inherent power to make and change rules of practice at will, with no external constraint other than applicable statute. This means that a rule of practice in force at the time of a case may have been rescinded by the time a researcher looks for it — or may never have appeared in any published source. When reconstructing historical practice before a particular court, secondary sources and practitioners' manuals of the period (e.g., period-specific editions of Tidd's Practice or Chitty's Practice) are often more reliable guides than the court's own formal records.
For administrative law research, the distinction between an agency's rules of practice and its substantive regulations is outcome-determinative in some contexts. Courts have treated the two differently for purposes of notice-and-comment requirements, deference, and enforceability against the agency itself. The Law Mind Administrative Law corpus addresses this boundary in scope-of-practice and unauthorized-practice materials.
Jurisdictional variation is significant: in some state systems, "rules of practice" remains the operative term in court rules and statutes. Researchers should not assume that a state court's "rules of practice" and "rules of civil procedure" are coextensive — they may be separate documents covering different ground.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Bouvier's definitions are substantively aligned: both treat rules of practice as court-issued orders regulating procedure. Bouvier adds the more doctrinally significant point — that every court of record holds inherent power to make, alter, and rescind such rules, and that once in force, the rules must be applied uniformly with no judicial discretion to deviate unless the rule itself creates discretionary space. This is a notably strong statement of binding effect, and it stands in some tension with the modern understanding that local rules may be relaxed for good cause shown. The Bouvier entry appears truncated in available sources (the fragment ends mid-sentence), suggesting that further qualification may have followed. Neither source distinguishes rules of practice from rules of procedure with analytical rigor — that distinction became more important only after the promulgation of unified procedural codes in the twentieth century. Both sources also say nothing about administrative rules of practice, which reflects the pre-administrative-state moment of their drafting.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal administrative agencies use "rules of practice" as a term of art for their adjudicatory procedures, codified at various parts of Title 5 and agency-specific titles in the CFR. Several state court systems — including some equity and probate courts — continue to publish documents specifically titled "Rules of Practice" that differ in content and authority from their general rules of civil procedure. A researcher should check both sets of rules when working in those courts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Administrative Law & Government Encyclopedia, admin_116: Scope of Practice Disputes and Unauthorized Practice — addresses the administrative law dimension of practice regulation and the boundary between rules of practice and substantive agency authority.