Definition
A side bar rule is a procedural order in English practice that court officers were authorized to grant as a matter of course, without requiring formal application to the full court in open session. Such rules issued routinely on the motion of an attorney without the formality of a noticed hearing, and were understood to be ministerial in character — that is, granted automatically upon proper request rather than at judicial discretion. They stood in contrast to rules requiring argument before the court itself.
Common Confusion
SIDE BAR RULE (historical procedural order) vs. SIDEBAR (modern courtroom conference): In modern usage, a "sidebar" refers to an informal conference between the judge and counsel conducted at the side of the bench, typically outside the jury's hearing. This usage is purely spatial and has no connection to the historical side bar rule, which was a category of court order, not a type of conference. The confusion arises because both terms invoke the physical margin of the courtroom — the "side bar" where attorneys historically stood apart from formal proceedings — but the legal content of the terms is entirely different. Researchers encountering "side bar" in older sources should determine from context whether a procedural rule or a courtroom conference is meant.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is largely a term of English practice and appears with greatest frequency in sources from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Researchers working with colonial-era American materials or early republic practice manuals will encounter it, since American common law procedure borrowed heavily from English forms during this period. By the mid-nineteenth century, procedural reform movements — culminating in code pleading and, later, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — displaced much of the vocabulary of the old rule-based system, and the side bar rule as a distinct category largely disappeared from American legal literature. Researchers should not confuse historical references to the side bar rule with the modern courtroom practice of "sidebar" conferences between counsel and the judge (see Common Confusion below). The two share a spatial metaphor but describe entirely different things. When reading treatises on English or early American pleading and practice, the side bar rule is part of a larger taxonomy of procedural rules — including rules nisi, rules absolute, and peremptory rules — and understanding its place in that taxonomy is necessary to read those sources accurately.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary defines the side bar rule as a rule "authorized by the courts to be granted by their officers as a matter of course, without formal application being made to them in open court," and traces the name to the practice of attorneys moving for such rules "at side bar, that is, in an informal way." Burrill credits Coke's Institutes (3 Inst. 169) in the surrounding entry, though that citation appears in connection with a seal-related passage and the precise textual anchor for the side bar rule itself is the informal attorney practice Burrill describes. The definition is brief but reliable for its period. Historical dictionaries generally agree on the core meaning: these were ministerial, course-of-office orders distinguished from rules requiring judicial exercise of discretion. What the historical sources do not address is the complete disappearance of this procedural category in American practice following code reform — a gap researchers must supply from their own contextual knowledge when dating a source or interpreting an older treatise.
Jurisdictional Note
The side bar rule is a term of English common law practice. Its use in American sources is derivative and primarily historical, concentrated in the period before procedural codes replaced the common law rule system. It has no meaningful presence in modern American or English procedural law.