I’m always trying to find the best way to find the Arizona Rules of Family Law Procedure online. I do this for my own benefit and to respond to people who ask me for this. While Westlaw’s link to Arizona Rules was not operational for awhile, as of September, 2010, Rebecca Stahl let me know that Westlaw’s Rules site is back up and running (Thanks Rebecca). It’s at Arizona Court Rules Forum If you click on “Rules of Family Law Procedure” at this site, you’ll get the list of our Rules, and then you click on the individual sections to see the rules.
On September 2, 2010, the Arizona Supreme Court approved Rules changes, and those changes take effect 1-1-2011. The Order showing the changes is Download OrderAmending. The changes effective 1-1-2011 are to Family Rules 5.1, 47, 67B, 69, 74 and 78. I’ll do a separate blog post on those specific changes.
Essentially the Supreme Court accepted all the changes which were recommended by the State Bar Family Practice and Procedure Committee in 2009, with one exception: A proposed comment to Rule 78 “Judgments” was not accepted. Rule 78E now states “Offers of Judgment Not Applicable. The procedure governing offers of judgment, authority in civil actions (Civ.Rule 68) shall not apply in any legal matter subject to these Rules.” The Supreme Court did not feel that a Comment of further explanation was necessary.
At Rules you can find the Arizona Supreme Court’s most recent Order adopting changes to the Rules which were effective 1-1-2009. This is a nice thing to have, and shows the changes with strikeouts and bolding. BUT, for any Rules sections which were not changed in 2009, this document just says “no changes to current text”. So it’s not complete.
Another great document is attached. Download ARFLP_Red,_Blue_and_Green[1] It’s informally called the “red, blue and green” version of the Rules. The red inserts in this document show the changes that were effective 1-1-2008; the blue is changes effective 1-1-2009; and the green are possible future changes. I can’t emphasize “possible” enough; anything in green has not even yet been sent to the Supreme Court in the form of a Rules petition, so you can’t count on those possible changes unless they appear in a future Petition to the Arizona Supreme Court. At the earliest, they could represent changes that could take place in 2011.
