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California Rules of Court: Reordered and Renumbered Rules
Judith C. Wolff, Managing Editor, CEB Topics
E-mail: email:judith.wolff@ceb.ucop.edu

Introduction
The Renumbered Rules
Background on the Changes

Introduction
As most of our readers may already be aware, changes to the California Rules of Court go into effect on January 1, 2007. CEB has posted an “Old to New” concordance table on the CEB website to aid in adjustment to the newly-organized rules. The CEB concordance table lists the old Rule (including subsections), the corresponding new Rule (including subsections), a brief publisher’s note, and the title of the new Rule or section of the Rule. The updates to CEB books published between now and December, 2006, will contain both the old and the new cites to the Rules of Ct.. Beginning with the December updates (which publish at the end of December), all CEB updates will contain citations to the new Rules of Court.

Corrections and suggestions for improvements to CEB’s concordance table are welcome and should be sent to submissionseditor@ceb.ucop.edu.

The Judicial Council has also created conversion tables to go with the rules reorganization, available at:

1. New/old

2. Old/new

As part of the reorganization, the Rules of Court have been reordered and renumbered. For example, old Rule 1 (filing the appeal) has been renumbered as new Rule 8.100. In a few instances, a subsection of an old Rule has become a new Rule, e.g., old Rule 11 subsection (a) has become new Rule 8.150 subsections (a)-(b) and old Rule 11 subsection (b) has become new rule 8.153.

The Renumbered Rules
The newly renumbered rules are contained within 10 titles:

Title 1. Rules Applicable to All Courts – containing all repeating definitions
Title 2. Trial Court Rules
Title 3. Civil Rules
Title 4. Criminal Rules (essentially unchanged)
Title 5. Family and Juvenile Rules
Title 6. [Reserved] – replaces the pre-2007 appellate rules
Title 7. Probate Rules
Title 8. Appellate Rules
Title 9. Rules on Law Practice, Attorneys, and Judges
Title 10. Judicial Administration Rules – was title 6.

The 10 titles are followed by the Standards of Judicial Administration, the Code of Judicial Ethics, the Ethics Standards of Neutral Arbitrators in Contractual Arbitrations, and a set of Appendixes.

Background on the Changes
Patrick O’Donnell, a supervising attorney at the Office of the General Counsel of the Judicial Council - Administrative Office of the Courts (and a past contributor to the CEB Civil Litigation Reporter) was one of the chief architects of the new rules, which were several years in the reworking. Heather Anderson, Office of the General Counsel, and Audrey Fancy, Center for Children and Families in the Court, were also very active in the effort. Mr. O’Donnell explains the exegesis of the changes by noting that the rules were unwieldy because they were not well organized. “The scheme of the standards was not logical,” O’Donnell points out. “The problems included different, inconsistent formats and numbering. The old titles had grown in ways that were hard to locate, making it hard to find rules in a local place. Another issue was the outdated style of language used.” The new rules, for example, substitute “must be done” for the outmoded “shall be done,” “before” for “prior to,” and “instead of” in place of “in lieu of.” O’Donnell notes that while the drafters did not attempt a complete codal rewrite, they did make efforts to use more modern language whenever appropriate.

At a 2005 meeting of the Judicial Council Mr. O’Donnell said to the committee, “The rules were originally created by Bernie Witkin in the 1940’s...As the rules evolved over the next sixty years there was a piece meal kind of process...So what we have today is kind of a patchwork throw rug...The purpose (now)...is to create a pattern blanket, if not a finely woven Persian blanket.”

More recently Mr. O’Donnell said “The new rules represent an effort at better organization, less convoluted numbering, a readable format, and some minor stylistic changes,” O’Donnell said more recently. Although the changes are not substantive, new substantive rules that have been written in the past year are being incorporated into the new rules. Mr. O’Donnell feels optimistic that after a period of adjustment, users of the new rules will find them more coherently organized and easier to use than the old system. For the most part, the changes affecting nearly 1,000 rules are not substantive. There are some changes to juvenile rules to make them consistent with statute, and some changes to other rules, but for the most part the rules themselves are unchanged.

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