Procedural Bottlenecks in Pennsylvania Civil Practice: A Catalog of Proposed Reforms

This article catalogs 17 procedural bottlenecks in Pennsylvania civil practice and proposes 17 targeted reforms. Drawing on the National Center for State Courts’ 2024 Judicial Needs Assessment—which identifies a statewide shortfall of approximately 38 Common Pleas judgeships—the article argues that the Commonwealth’s measurable judicial-capacity problem is compounded, not caused, by its procedural rules. Those rules require duplicative filings, separate proceedings to complete results already substantively decided, county-by-county variation in matters that ought to be uniform and constructive notice through a medium that almost no one reads.

The cataloged bottlenecks range across the life of a civil action: commencement (the writ-of-summons placeholder), pleadings (kitchen-sink New Matter, unlimited amendments), service (the Commonwealth-service patchwork, newspaper-publication notice under Pa.R.C.P. 430), judgments and case management (the MDJ-to-CommonPleas execution shuffle, cross-county certified copies, compulsory-arbitration thresholds, tag-along coordination, the alias writ of possession) and collateral consequences (pardon-expungement, firearm return). Most of the suggested reforms lie within the authority of the Civil Procedural Rules Committee to propose to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for approval. The Bar has been complaining about each for a generation; the next round of committee work should address them.