Rule 3.981.Minor Personal Protection Orders; Issuance; Modification; Recision; Appeal

MCR 3.981 is a signpost. It runs two sentences and does its work by pointing elsewhere, which is why a reader who lands here looking for procedure will not find any procedure on the page.

Getting the order, and changing it

The first sentence covers four events in the life of a minor personal protection order: issuance, dismissal, modification, and recision. Procedure for all four is governed by subchapter 3.700. That single line answers most of the questions a practitioner brings to this rule. A petitioner asking a court to enter an order against a minor respondent, a respondent asking to have one narrowed, and either side asking to have one undone all work from subchapter 3.700 rather than from the juvenile rules printed around this one.

Notice the word the rule uses for undoing an order that has already been entered: recision. The rules grouped after this one speak in the vocabulary of violation, contempt, and enforcement. MCR 3.981 covers the other half of an order's life, the half that runs between the court and the parties rather than between the court and a minor accused of breaking a command.

Appeals

The second sentence assigns appeals related to minor personal protection orders to two rules at once: MCR 3.709 and MCR 3.993. They are named together, with no ranking between them and no instruction about which one controls if they point in different directions. A party planning an appeal has both to read.

Reading the rule in place

MCR 3.981 sits at the head of the rules on minor personal protection orders, and its job is to keep that group from restating subchapter 3.700. How an order comes into being, how it is dismissed, how its terms change, and how it is undone all belong to those rules. Nothing in the text of MCR 3.981 speaks to what happens after a minor disobeys an order. The rule draws a line and leaves the enforcement side of it to the rules numbered after it.