# Rules Enabling Act **P.L. 73-415, 48 Stat. 1064, enacted 19 June 1934; codified at 28 U.S.C. §§ 2071–2077.** The statute that delegates to the Supreme Court the power to prescribe general rules of practice, procedure and evidence for the federal district courts and courts of appeals, and that sets out the process by which those rules are made and amended. The operative provisions: - **§ 2071** — local rulemaking by individual courts. - **§ 2072(a)** — the delegation: the Supreme Court "shall have the power to prescribe general rules of practice and procedure and rules of evidence." - **§ 2072(b)** — the two limits, and the supremacy clause: such rules "shall not abridge, enlarge or modify any substantive right," and "All laws in conflict with such rules shall be of no further force or effect after such rules have taken effect." - **§ 2073** — committee procedure: open meetings, public minutes, notice, an explanatory note and minority views — and § 2073(e), which provides that failure to comply with any of it does not invalidate a rule. - **§ 2074(a)** — transmission to Congress by 1 May, effective no earlier than 1 December. - **§ 2074(b)** — the carve-out: a rule creating, abolishing or modifying an evidentiary privilege has no force unless approved by Act of Congress. - **§ 2075** — bankruptcy rules, on a parallel track. Congress has stopped a completed package under this statute once: it postponed the Federal Rules of Evidence by statute in March 1973 and then enacted them itself, with substantial changes, in January 1975. ## Origins: 1934 and the rules it produced Before 1934, federal courts hearing actions at law had to follow the procedure of the state they sat in, under the Conformity Act of 1872, while equity had its own federal rules. The bar reform campaign that produced the Act, pushed through by Attorney General Homer Cummings, aimed at one national, uniform procedure. The first and most important product was the **Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938)**. They merged law and equity into a single "civil action," created notice pleading and modern discovery, and became the template most states later copied. The criminal (1946), appellate (1968) and evidence (1975) rules followed. ## The line it draws: substance versus procedure Section 2072(b)'s limit, that a rule may not "abridge, enlarge or modify any substantive right," is where the Act meets politics. The Supreme Court has read it generously in favor of the rules: - *Sibbach v. Wilson* (1941): a rule is valid if it "really regulates procedure." - *Hanna v. Plumer* (1965): a valid federal rule governs in federal court even when state law differs. - *Shady Grove v. Allstate* (2010): a federal class-action rule displaced a New York statute that barred class actions for statutory penalties. The result is that choices with large substantive effects, including pleading standards, class actions and discovery scope, get made as "procedure" by committees of judges and lawyers. That is why business groups and plaintiffs' lawyers both lobby the rules committees as hard as they lobby Congress. ## 1988: sunshine without teeth The Judicial Improvements and Access to Justice Act of 1988 rewrote the process into its current form: open meetings, public minutes, published drafts, notice and comment (§ 2073). It also added § 2073(e), which says failure to follow any of it does not invalidate a rule. The committees must be transparent, but nothing happens if they aren't. ## The track in 2025–26 Two live examples show how the machinery works: - **Evidence Rule 609** was withdrawn in August 2026 at the last stage, after the Judicial Conference's Executive Committee objected to the committee note. See [[How a Federal Rule of Procedure Is Made]]. - **Proposed Evidence Rule 707**, on machine-generated and AI evidence, would have required AI output offered without an expert to meet the Rule 702 reliability standard. It was published for comment in August 2025 (comments closed Feb. 16, 2026). In June 2026 the Standing Committee **declined to move it forward** and sent it back for more study alongside the deepfake problem. The rules process is now where the federal judiciary decides how AI evidence gets into court, with no statute and no elected votes. ## See also - [[How a Federal Rule of Procedure Is Made]] — the process this statute creates, drawn stage by stage - [[Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure]] - [[Judicial Conference of the United States]] - [[Federal Rules of Civil Procedure]] · [[Federal Rules of Evidence]] · [[Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure]] · [[Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure]]