The forms of action were the different procedures by which a legal claim could be made during much of the history of the English common law.
In the early Middle Ages, the focus was on the procedure that was employed to bring one's claim to the royal courts of King's Bench or Common Pleas: it was the form of one's action, not its substance, which occupied legal discussion.
Modern English law, as in most other legal systems, now looks to substance rather than to form: a claimant needs only to demonstrate a valid cause of action.
[1] Rights and duties which are today considered to be part of the law of property, tort, contract or unjust enrichment were not conceptualised as such.
Following the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century, a system of centralized royal justice gradually began to take shape.
During the 14th century the royal courts gradually allowed actions which did not involve breaches of the King's Peace.
Problems such as these prompted litigants to turn to the Court of Chancery, which had begun to develop judicial functions in the early 14th century.
[7] For example, in a writ of debt sur contract, the defendant could generally elect between having a jury trial or wager of law.
Chancery developed a stronger system of precedent and, in the words of Professor Sir John Baker, "hardened into a kind of law".
[8] During the 19th century, Parliament passed several laws to simplify legal procedure, and the old forms of action were gradually swept away: The final vestige of the forms of action was abolished in 1980 by Chancellor Hailsham: the language of the original writs in which the sovereign commanded the defendant to appear in court and answer, or else.
New York was the first to abolish them, by enacting a Code of Civil Procedure in 1850 at the suggestion of David Dudley Field II.
Section 307 of the California Code of Civil Procedure is a typical example of how the forms of action were abolished in those states: "There is in this State but one form of civil actions for the enforcement or protection of private rights and the redress or prevention of private wrongs."