54 Indiana University Studies 
some day legal procedure in the United States will be reformed 
so as to make it a real instrument for the administration of 
justice, and not what it is today — the rules for a game to 
be played by trial attorneys. 
Other forms of civil procedure are equity procedure, probate 
procedure, and commission procedure. Each one of these 
forms of procedure differs from the other, and all differ 
from common law and code procedure. No extended explana- 
tion of these different forms of procedure will be undertaken. 
In equity procedure the system of pleading is different from 
common law or code and there are many other peculiarities. 
The difference between equity procedure and common law 
procedure is greater than that between equity procedure and 
code procedure. Many of the characteristics of equity pro- 
cedure have been incorporated into code procedure. In probate 
procedure there is ordinarily no pleading but in lieu thereof 
a petition. The practice also differs materially from other 
forms of practice, and for the most part consists of a succes- 
sion of petitions, motions, orders, and decrees, with the con- 
sequent hearings and introduction of evidence. Commis- 
sion procedure in the United States is also very different from 
the other forms of procedure which exist in the United States. 
In general it may be said to resemble the modern English 
common law procedure more than any other form of pro- 
cedure, both as to the matter of pleading and as to the con- 
trol of the members of the commission over the conduct of 
the trials. One reason for the difference between common 
law and code procedure and the other forms of legal procedure 
in the United States is the absence of jury trials in the latter. 
Anyone practicing law before an equity court, or a probate 
court, or before a commission especially, should remember that 
a different system of legal procedure obtains in them from 
that with which he may be familiar in other courts. Still an- 
other form of procedure, arbitration procedure, is growing 
up in this country. It has not yet taken its final form, but it 
gives evidence of a tendency to become much like commission 
procedure. 
courts and procedure, 7 Jour. Am. Jud. Soc. No. 6 ; Kale, “The English Judicature Acts”, 
4 Jour. Am. Jud. Soc. No. 5 ; Rosenbaum, The Rule-Making Poiver in the English Su- 
preme Court; and Sunderland, “English Struggle for Procedural Reform”, 39 Harv. L. 
Rev. 725. 
