Rule 3.001.Applicability and Scope

MCR 3.001 opens Chapter 3 and does the work a scope provision should do. Two sentences answer two questions: which courts use the rules that follow, and which rules govern the parts of a proceeding the chapter does not reach. Every proceeding in the chapter sits under this rule.

Which courts

The chapter applies in circuit court. Beyond that, it reaches other courts only as provided by law or by these rules. The grant is deliberate rather than open. Another court does not pick up a Chapter 3 proceeding because the subject matter looks like a fit; it does so because a law or another Michigan Court Rule places the matter there. When a reader wonders whether some other court can run one of these proceedings, the answer comes from the law or rule that assigns it, not from the chapter itself.

Which rules fill the space

The second sentence makes the Michigan Court Rules the default for proceedings under this chapter. The exception runs to two sources: this chapter, and law. Where a rule in Chapter 3 speaks to a point, that rule controls. Where law speaks to it, the law controls. Where neither does, the general body of Michigan Court Rules supplies the procedure.

How the layers stack

The result is a reading order rather than a separate procedural system. A reader starts with the specific rule for the proceeding at hand, checks the law that authorizes or governs it, and then falls back on the general rules for everything left unsaid. Chapter 3 is not a self-contained code. It is a set of specialized overlays on ordinary practice, and this rule says so at the outset.

Two points follow. Silence in a Chapter 3 rule is not a hole in the procedure, because the general rules answer what the chapter does not. And a conflict between a Chapter 3 rule and a general rule resolves in favor of the chapter, because the chapter is the stated exception. Law sits inside that same exception, so a governing law displaces the general rules the same way a chapter provision does.