COMMON LAW PLEADINGS IN CIVIL PROCEDURE OF THE USA
The article is devoted to the institution of adversarial papers exchange (pleading), which was formed in civil proceedings under the rules of common law and existed in the greater territory of the United States until the middle of the 19th Century. The main factor that influenced the institution concerned is the participation of the jury in the resolution of the case, which determined the main feature of the stage. Its purpose is the formulation of the dispute’s subject matter or a contentious issue. If the disputed issue was of a legal nature, it was resolved by the judge, if actual - referred to the jury. Hence there is a strict separation of the professional judge’s functions and the jury and the division of the whole process into two stages: pleading and trial. The nature of the procedure was determined by the appropriate form of recourse to the court, which ultimately constituted a deterrent in the development of judicial proceedings, led to its inadequacy in public relations and inability to live. The disadvantage of the stage of pleading was that it did not offer any means of verifying the actual basis for the allegations and negations of the parties. The pleading system was unable to differentiate between the truly controversial facts (circumstances) and the indisputable ones. The stage of pleading has always occupied a significant place in the American civil process (after the English one). In spite of the fact that pleading, according to the rules of common law, is not currently applied in the USA, rudiments of this institute are still being discovered. Therefore, the rapid degeneration of the role of the judge in the preparatory stage of US civil proceedings in the XX century is impossible to explain without considering the history of changes in the institution of pleading. In the US it has passed a long way, which began long before the formation of American law itself.