Editing Pleading (section)

===Common law===
Common law pleading was the system of  [[civil procedure]] used in England, which early on developed a strong emphasis on the [[form of action]] rather than the [[cause of action]] (as a result of the [[Provisions of Oxford]], which severely limited the evolution of the common law writ system). The emphasis was on procedure over substance.

[[Law]] and [[equity (law)|equity]] evolved as separate judicial systems, each with its own procedures and remedies. Because the types of claims eligible for consideration was capped early during the development of the English legal system, claims that might have been acceptable to the courts' evolving sense of justice often did not match up perfectly with any of the established forms of action. Lawyers had to engage in great ingenuity to shoehorn their clients' claims into existing forms of action.  The result was that at common law, pleadings were stuffed full of awkward [[legal fiction]]s that had little to do with the actual "real-world" facts of the case.<ref name="Hepburn_Page24">{{cite book |last1=Hepburn |first1=Charles McGuffey |title=The Historical Development of Code Pleading in America and England |date=1897 |publisher=W.H. Anderson & Co. |location=Cincinnati |pages=24–38 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZAk-AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA24 |access-date=4 August 2020}}</ref>  The placeholder name [[John Doe]] (still commonly used in American pleading to name unknown parties) is a remnant of this period.

In its final form in the 19th century, common law pleading was terribly complex and slow by modern standards. The parties would normally go through several rounds of pleadings before the parties were deemed to have clearly stated their controversy, so that the case was "at issue" and could proceed to trial.  A case would begin with a complaint in which the plaintiff alleged the facts entitling him to relief, then the defendant would file any one of a variety of pleas as an answer, followed by a replication from the plaintiff, a rejoinder from the defendant, a surrejoinder from the plaintiff, a rebutter from the defendant, and a surrebutter from the plaintiff.  At each stage, a party could file a demurrer to the other's pleading (essentially a request that the court immediately rule on whether the pleading was legally adequate before they had to file a pleading in response) or simply file another pleading in response.<ref name="Baker">{{cite book |last=Baker |first=John |author-link=John Baker (legal historian) |date= January 2002 |title=An Introduction to English Legal History |edition=4 |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |pages=76–79 |isbn=978-0-406-93053-8 }}</ref>

Generally, a plea could be dilatory or peremptory. There were three kinds of dilatory plea: to the jurisdiction, in suspension, or in abatement. The first challenged the court's jurisdiction, the second asked the court to stay the action, and the third asked the court to dismiss the action without prejudice to the other side's right to bring the claims in another action or another court. A peremptory plea had only one kind: a plea in bar. A party making a plea in bar could either traverse the other side's pleading (i.e., deny all or some of the facts pleaded) or confess and avoid it (i.e., admit the facts pleaded but plead new ones that would dispel their effect). A traverse could be general (deny everything) or specific.  Either side could plead imparlance in order to get more time to plead on the merits. Once the case was at issue, the defendant could reopen the pleadings in order to plead a newly discovered defense (and start the whole sequence again) by filing a plea puis darrein.

The result of all this complexity was that to ascertain what was "at issue" in a case, a stranger to the case (i.e., such as a newly appointed judge) would have to sift through a huge pile of pleadings to figure out what had happened to the original averments of the complaint and whether there was anything left to be actually adjudicated by the court.