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Pleadings are essential parts of a lawsuit that explain the events leading to the suit without legal terms. Pleadings must contain material facts briefly and avoid evidence or irrelevant statements. Pleadings can be amended before trial with court permission.

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Ashu Sachan
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16 views

Document

Pleadings are essential parts of a lawsuit that explain the events leading to the suit without legal terms. Pleadings must contain material facts briefly and avoid evidence or irrelevant statements. Pleadings can be amended before trial with court permission.

Uploaded by

Ashu Sachan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as RTF, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Pleadings are the part of every lawsuit which explain what the events leading to the suit have

occurred
without any mention of any kind of legal terms or any indication towards any kind of laws that may or
may not have been broken etc. Without pleadings, a suit is not complete and therefore cannot be
brought before court either. The definition of pleadings in Indian law can be found in Order 6 Rule 1 of
CPC (the Civil Procedure Code) which says that “ ‘Pleading’ shall mean plaint or written statement.”[1]
Plaint here refers to the statement that the plaintiff writes for a civil court suit to shed light to his claim
while the other written statement referred to is the statement that the defendant is required to submit
within thirty days of the date of summons from the court.[2] Since these pleadings directly go to court,
there are certain rules and regulations that the plaintiff or the defendant has to follow before he or she
can submit the pleadings, which expect a certain standard and procedure that they need to stick to.
Some of the regulations are as follows[3]:-

i) Pleading should contain the facts, but no law should be applied in pleadings. Only the court has the
power to apply the law on the basis of fact stated in the Pleadings.

ii) Pleadings should contain material facts. Parties should avoid using immaterial or irrelevant facts in the
Pleadings.

iii) Parties should not give the evidence in the pleadings from which facts are proved.

iv) Pleadings should contain the material facts in the brief form. Parties should avoid using irrelevant or
immaterial statements while drafting the Plaint.

For example, in the case Gouri Dutt Ganesh Lal Firm v. Madho Prasad[4], the court made a defining
statement for pleadings in general by stating that pleadings should, “plead facts, not laws.” In another
example, in the case Virender Nath Gautam v. Satpal Singh & Ors.[5] the court cleared up the fact that
material facts are those which help the plaintiff to make clear to the court what his or her cause of
action is or for the defendant to make his or her case stronger.

As is evident, pleadings are very important for the workings of a court and thus, the question arises,
whether pleadings can be amended after submission? To answer this question, the CPC states in Order
VI Rule 17[6] that: -
1. The Court may at any stage of the proceedings allow either party to alter or amend his pleadings in
such manner and on such terms as may be just, and all such amendments shall be made as may be
necessary for the purpose of determining the real questions in controversy between the parties.

2. Provided that no application for amendment shall be allowed after the trial has commenced, unless
the court comes to the conclusion that in spite of due diligence, the party could not have raised the
matter before the commencement of trial.

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