Civil Rule 20 Is Different

Civil Rule 20 Is Different

The number 20 belongs to more than one rulebook, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have a Rule 20 of their own that has nothing to do with moving a prosecution or taking a plea in another district. Civil Rule 20 governs permissive joinder of parties, which means the circumstances in which several plaintiffs may sue together, or several defendants may be sued together, in a single civil action.¹ Two tests control, and both must be met: the right to relief asserted by or against each party must arise out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences, and some question of law or fact common to all the parties must arise in the action.² The tests exist because one trial of related claims spares the court and the litigants from proving the same facts over and over. In Hohlbein v. Heritage Mutual Insurance Co. the court described the rule's purpose as promoting trial convenience by avoiding multiple lawsuits, extra expense, and lost time.³ Nothing in that purpose touches a plea, a sentence, or a United States attorney, so a criminal transfer can never be analyzed with civil joinder tests.

The shared numbering makes the trap sharper, because even the subdivisions line up. Civil Rule 20(a)(2) addresses joining defendants, and it permits persons, along with a vessel, cargo, or other property subject to admiralty process in rem, to be joined in one action as defendants.⁴ In Luera v. M/V Alberta the Fifth Circuit pointed to that provision as showing that the unified rules contemplate hybrid proceedings in which admiralty and non-admiralty claims are brought together.⁵ Criminal Rule 20(a)(2) shares the same number and says something unrelated: the transfer of a prosecution for a plea requires that the United States attorneys in both districts approve it in writing.⁶ Students lose this issue when they let the rule number decide which rule applies, since the subject matter of the problem decides it.

Civil Rule 20 appears in decided cases in ordinary settings, and each one is recognizable by its parties and its subject. A bus passenger who sues both the bus company and the driver of the colliding car may join them as defendants, because both claims arise from one collision and share the common question of who was at fault.⁷ In Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. the added plaintiffs had been permissively joined under civil Rule 20, and the Court's concern was whether federal jurisdiction reached their claims, a question that belongs to a different part of civil procedure.⁸ In Hohlbein four plaintiffs who each claimed to have been misled about an executive job sued the same employer, the employer moved to sever their claims, and the court denied the motion.⁹ The remedy for improper joinder in that setting comes from civil Rule 21, which allows any claim against a party to be severed and proceeded with separately.¹⁰ Civil Rule 21 therefore deals with severing and adding parties, and it shares only a number with the criminal rule on contested transfer.

The criminal rule looks different in practice because the setting is different. In Clanton v. United States a defendant was charged with bank robberies in Atlanta and in Miami, the Miami case was transferred to Atlanta under Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and he pleaded guilty to both charges there.¹¹ A defendant's plea and the agreement of two prosecuting offices drove that transfer, and no joinder of parties was involved. The same caution reaches rule sets outside the federal rules: the Fifth Circuit's local Rule 20 permits dismissal of a frivolous appeal, and Mississippi's appellate Rule 20 lets a federal appellate court certify a question of state law to the state supreme court.¹²