Rule 3.701.Applicability of Rules; Forms

MCR 3.701 opens this subchapter and tells a reader which set of rules governs which kind of protective proceeding. Three separate tracks run out of one subchapter, and the rule sorts a new filing onto the right one before anything else happens.

The default and what displaces it

Subrule (A) starts from the ordinary position: actions for personal protection against domestic violence or stalking, and actions for extreme risk protection, are governed by the Michigan Court Rules. That default yields to this subchapter and to MCL 600.2950, MCL 600.2950a, and MCL 691.1801 to MCL 691.1821. The general civil rules keep working in the background, filling whatever the subchapter and those statutes leave open.

Three tracks

• Personal protection orders against adults. MCR 3.702 to MCR 3.709 supply the procedure, from the petition through contempt and appeal.
• Extreme risk protection. MCR 3.715 to MCR 3.722 handle those actions on a parallel set of rules.
• Personal protection orders against minors. Procedure comes from subchapter 3.900, the juvenile rules, except as MCR 3.981 provides.

It is the respondent who steers the case. A protective action against a minor moves to the juvenile side of subchapter 3.900; an action against an adult stays in the rules that follow this one.

Forms

Subrule (B) gives the state court administrator the job of approving forms for personal protection act proceedings and for extreme risk protection act proceedings, and requires the clerk of the circuit court to make them available for public distribution. The two duties work together. One office writes the forms and every circuit clerk hands out the same ones, so a form picked up in one circuit is the form the next circuit expects to see.

Read together, the two subrules give this subchapter its shape: statute and specialized rule govern the protective action itself, the general rules cover everything else, and the paperwork is standardized statewide.