§ 9-11-9.Pleading special matters

Most allegations follow the short-and-plain standard of Code Section 9-11-8, but a handful of recurring pleading situations call for their own rules, and this section supplies them. A party doesn’t have to plead the capacity of a party to sue or be sued, the authority of someone suing or defending in a representative role, or the legal existence of an organized association named as a party — those are presumed unless someone raises a specific negative averment challenging them, backed by whatever supporting detail is uniquely within that pleader’s knowledge.

Fraud and mistake get the opposite treatment: the circumstances constituting the fraud or mistake must be stated with particularity, not left to a general accusation. But a person’s malice, intent, knowledge, or other state of mind can be alleged generally, since those internal facts are hard to plead with the same specificity.

Conditions precedent work on a similar asymmetry. A party who wants to allege that all conditions precedent were performed or occurred can do so with a general averment; a party who wants to deny that gets no such shortcut and must deny performance or occurrence specifically and with particularity. Official documents and acts, and judgments or decisions of courts and tribunals, can likewise be pled by averring the document was issued or the act was done in compliance with law, or that the judgment or decision exists, without pleading the underlying jurisdictional facts. Time and place allegations count as material for testing a pleading’s sufficiency, and items of special damage have to be specifically stated rather than left to a general claim for damages.