Rule 18.Joinder of Claims and Remedies

Rule 18(a) removes any cap on how many claims a party can bring against an opposing party in one pleading. Whether the claim is an original claim, a counterclaim, a cross-claim, or a third-party claim, the party asserting it can join as many others as it has against that same opponent, and it can plead them as independent claims or as alternatives to each other. The official Notes describe this as eliminating restrictions on joinder altogether: legal and equitable claims, or any mix of the two, can sit in the same pleading, and a party doesn't have to choose a single consistent theory or elect a remedy at the pleading stage.

That freedom is deliberately limited to what can be pleaded together, not what will be tried together. The official Notes point out that Rule 18(a) governs only the scope of joinder in the pleadings, leaving questions of trial convenience, jurisdiction, and venue to be worked out elsewhere — through tools like a separate-trial order under Rule 42(b) if trying every joined claim in one proceeding would create confusion or unfairness. The underlying idea is that joining claims in a pleading causes no inconvenience by itself; any inconvenience comes only from trying multiple matters together, and that's a problem the rules solve at the trial stage rather than by restricting what a party may plead.

Rule 18(b) adds a narrower joinder rule for remedies that traditionally could be pursued only in sequence — a claim once available only after another claim had already been prosecuted to a conclusion can now be joined with that first claim in a single action. Even so, the court's relief in that action still tracks the parties' actual substantive rights; joinder changes the procedure for bringing the claims together, not the underlying legal entitlement to relief.