Rule 2.One Form of Action

Rule 2 states its whole rule in seven words: there is one form of action — the civil action. Before rules like this, a lawsuit had to be labeled and processed as either an action at law or a suit in equity, each with its own procedural rulebook. North Dakota, following the federal rules, erased that line. Whatever the substance of a claim, it moves through court as a single kind of case.

Collapsing law and equity into one action did not erase every consequence of the old distinction. The right to a jury trial still depends on history: Article I, Section 13 of the North Dakota Constitution preserves the right to a jury in any case where a jury could have been demanded as a matter of right at common law. A court deciding whether a party is entitled to a jury for a particular claim still has to ask what that claim would have looked like under the old law-versus-equity divide, even though the case itself is filed and litigated as one unified civil action.

Rule 2 was last amended in 2011, and that change was cosmetic rather than substantive — part of a rule-wide rewrite meant to make the rules easier to read and more consistent in style and terminology, prompted by the federal rules' 2007 restyling. The core idea, one form of action, has held since well before that rewrite.