THE MERGER OF LAW AND EQUITY: 20 YEARS AFTER AMENDMENT 80
By Jim L. Julian and Rachel Hildebrand
Julian
Hildebrand
Jim Julian is a former President of the Arkansas Bar Association and chaired the campaign for the passage of Amendment 80. He is Of Counsel to the Barber Law firm. Rachel Hildebrand is an associate attorney at Barber Law Firm PLLC. 22
The Arkansas Lawyer
www.arkbar.com
Introduction & Background On November 7, 2000, commonly referred to as “a watershed event in the history of the Judicial Department of this state,”1 Arkansas voters approved Amendment 80, which modernized the judicial article of the Arkansas Constitution by eliminating courts of chancery, and by establishing circuit courts as the state’s trial courts of general jurisdiction, replacing the dual system which one lawyer had previously characterized as “a cumbersome relic which still breathes.”2 The practice of law has changed a great deal in the 20 years since, yet, due to size constraints, this brief article aims simply to address Amendment 80’s key components. Prior to 2000, chancery courts were vested with jurisdiction over “all matters in equity,”3 meaning such matters as domestic relations, partition actions, disputes involving trusts, and requests for equitable remedies such as specific performance.4 A plaintiff in a chancery court was required to allege in his or her complaint that “irreparable harm” would be suffered unless equitable relief was granted.5 In contrast, circuit courts were “courts of law,” meaning they held “original jurisdiction in all cases where jurisdiction [was] not expressly vested in another court.”6 For example, it was “well established that an action for money damages [wa]s cognizable in law.”7 In order to successfully attack a circuit court’s jurisdiction, a party was required to demonstrate that another court, i.e., the chancery court, was vested with exclusive jurisdiction.8 The dual system led to frustration because parties could spend years litigating a case, only to have the appellate courts later hold that the action should have been tried in the other court. In 1992, the Arkansas Supreme Court aptly characterized the inefficiency of the dual system when it wrote, “We do not share our colleagues' view that four years of hard fought litigation must go for naught and these parties sent back to square one to begin anew.”9 In fact, at the time Arkansas voters approved Amendment 80, only three other states (Delaware, Mississippi, and Tennessee) still maintained the archaic dual system of law and equity.10 In these states, including Arkansas, the problem of jurisdiction was always present. For example, in Ark. State Game & Fish Comm'n v. Sledge, a circuit court granted an injunction to the plaintiff. On appeal, however, the Arkansas Supreme Court concluded that the circuit court, a court of law, “was wholly without jurisdiction to enjoin”