§ 25-101.Civil action.

Before this code, a person suing over a broken contract used one procedural system — an action at law — while someone seeking an injunction or an accounting used another — a suit in equity. The two tracks had their own pleading forms, their own rules of evidence, and their own vocabulary. Pick the wrong one, and a court could throw the case out even when the underlying claim was sound. Section 25-101 tears that wall down. It abolishes the distinctions between actions at law and suits in equity, and every earlier form those actions took, and puts in their place one form of action: the civil action.

The change traces to the code-pleading reform movement of the mid-1800s, which swept through Nebraska and many other states at roughly the same time. Rather than forcing a plaintiff to match the facts to a historic writ or bill before filing suit, the code lets a plaintiff plead the facts and ask for whatever relief those facts support — legal, equitable, or both — in one lawsuit. A court can still apply legal principles to one part of a case and equitable principles to another, but the plaintiff no longer has to sort the claim into a labeled box first.

Section 25-101 sets no deadlines and creates no independent right. It works as the foundation the rest of Chapter 25 stands on, telling every later section that “action” means one thing in Nebraska: a civil action, whether the underlying claim sounds in law, in equity, or both.