Judgment on the Pleadings

Judgment on the Pleadings

Rule 12(c) lets a party ask for judgment once the pleadings are closed, provided the motion comes early enough not to delay trial.¹ The movant asks the court to rule in its favor on the pleadings already on file, without accepting evidence, a request that fits a case whose outcome rests on the court's reading of the law.² The motion carries forward part of an older function of pleading. Under earlier practice, a failure to follow the pleading rules ended the action with no leave to replead, and the pleadings acted as a screening device that kept many cases from going forward.³ Rule 12(c) keeps a narrower form of that screening: a case leaves on the pleadings only when the pleadings leave nothing for a trial to decide.

The timing language has two parts, and each does its own work. The pleadings must be closed because only then do the papers show where each side stands. The answer reveals which allegations the defendant admits, which it denies, and which defenses it raises, so the court can see whether any material fact is still contested. A Rule 12(c) motion is made after the answer, not before.⁴ When the plaintiff files a reply, the reply belongs to the record too.⁵ Before the answer arrives, the defendant attacks the complaint through the pre-answer Rule 12(b) motion, in which defenses may be joined without waiver and in which a Rule 12(b)(6) motion may target only some of the claims.⁶

The second requirement, that the motion not delay trial, serves a different end. A party who could hold the motion until the eve of trial could force the court to stop and decide it first, so the rule ties the motion to the trial schedule and keeps it from becoming a device for postponement. The first requirement explains when the motion is useful. It has utility only when all material allegations of fact are admitted in the pleadings and only questions of law remain.⁷ In that situation nothing a trial could add would change the result.

In function, Rule 12(c) is a delayed Rule 12(b)(6) motion with a larger record. The Hawaii Supreme Court, applying its counterpart rule, described the motion as serving much the same purpose as a motion for failure to state a claim, except that it comes after the pleadings close.⁸ Suppose a plaintiff's claim is not one the law recognizes as a legal wrong entitling the plaintiff to compensation. No reason exists to proceed to trial, and Rule 12(b)(6) lets the court short-circuit the case at the outset.⁹ Rule 12(c) allows the same result after the answer, and both motions keep the old screening function alive.¹⁰

The larger record gives Rule 12(c) its own substance. The record for decision is the complaint and the answer, as well as the reply, if any.¹¹ The defendant's admissions are now in front of the court, along with any affirmative defenses, which are new facts offered to defeat the claim even if the plaintiff's account is true. Either party may bring the motion.¹² The plaintiff reads the answer for admissions and for defenses that fail, and the defendant reads the complaint and answer together for a defense that is conclusive.

The plaintiff's most direct use of the motion rests on admissions. Under Rule 8(b)(6), an allegation that the answer does not deny is deemed admitted, unless it concerns the amount of damages.¹³ Suppose a plaintiff pleads detailed facts that would entitle the plaintiff to relief and demands $100,000. The defendant answers that it neither admits nor denies the allegations but demands strict proof of each. That response denies nothing, so every allegation unrelated to damages stands admitted, and the court should grant judgment on liability. The court should not enter judgment for $100,000, because silence about the demand does not admit that the harm reached that figure, and the plaintiff must still prove the amount.¹⁴ An admitted fact leaves nothing to try, but the measure of harm is something only proof can supply.

The admission rule runs in one direction. A plaintiff need not respond to an affirmative defense in the answer, and the plaintiff's silence counts as a denial.¹⁵ Suppose a licensor sues for royalties and the licensee answers that the licensor never invented the game it licensed. The licensor's failure to reply admits nothing, so the licensee cannot win on the pleadings by pointing to that silence.

The plaintiff has a second use for the motion that needs no admission. When the only defense in the answer fails as a matter of law, only a question of law remains, and judgment on the pleadings is available.¹⁶ A defendant who pleads the statute of frauds, which makes certain agreements unenforceable without a writing, against a complaint alleging a written contract offers a defense of this kind, provided the answer does not deny the writing. The complaint pleads the very thing the statute demands, and nothing is left to try.

A specific denial ends the plaintiff's motion. If the licensee in the royalty suit had denied that it signed the license, the denial would dispute a material fact, and a court cannot resolve that dispute from the pleadings. The motion works only when all material allegations are admitted,¹⁷ and a defendant who denies the right allegations has kept the case alive for discovery and proof.

The defendant's characteristic use of the motion depends on an affirmative defense that bars the claim outright, and the statute of limitations is the standard example. The mechanism needs both documents. The complaint supplies the dates, the answer pleads the defense, and together they establish the bar without evidence.¹⁸ This is the screening function of the pleadings at its cleanest, because the papers alone show that the case cannot go forward.¹⁹

The limit on all of this appears in Baehr v. Lewin, where the trial court treated a Rule 12(c) motion as though it were a trial. The case arose under Hawaii's counterpart to the federal rule, so it illustrates the logic of Rule 12(c) and does not bind a federal court.²⁰ The plaintiffs challenged the state's marriage laws, and the defendant, Lewin, urged in his memorandum that the complaint failed to state a claim because the plaintiffs had no cognizable right to enter state-licensed same-sex marriages.²¹ That is a legal-wrong argument of the kind Rules 12(b)(6) and 12(c) exist to resolve.²² But the circuit court granted the motion on an order that depended on findings of fact, made though no evidence had been received. The Hawaii Supreme Court held that judgment on the pleadings had been erroneously granted, because such an order must rest solely on the contents of the pleadings, and a claim that is evidentiary in nature and requires findings of fact cannot be disposed of under the rule.²³

The limit follows from the motion's design. A court that resolves disputed facts has left the function of a pleadings motion, and it has done so without the witnesses, testing, and record that make fact-finding reliable. A purely legal attack, that the law does not recognize the claim, is the kind the motion is built to decide, and a factual dispute is not.²⁴ Unverified statements of fact in counsel's memorandum or oral argument cannot fill the gap.²⁵ A party who wants the court to consider proof must follow Rule 12(d). If the court receives matters outside the pleadings and does not exclude them, it must treat the motion as one for summary judgment, and all parties must have a reasonable opportunity to present the pertinent material.²⁶ The next section takes up that conversion.