Rule 85.Title

Rule 85 does one job: it tells everyone what to call this body of rules. From this point forward, any court document, brief, or opinion that refers to "the Arkansas Rules of Civil Procedure" or the short form "ARCP" is pointing at the same set of rules a reader is looking at now. That kind of naming rule looks trivial until a court system lacks one -- then briefs start citing "the civil rules," "the procedural code," or half a dozen other labels, and cross-references get harder to track down.

Rule 85 sits next to Rule 86, which sets the rules' effective date -- together they close out the numbered rules with naming and housekeeping rather than steps in a lawsuit. In practice, lawyers and courts most often cite individual rules as "Ark. R. Civ. P." followed by the rule number, but the ARCP short form Rule 85 adopts remains the rules' own name for themselves.