No civil case, originating in a general sessions court and carried to a higher court, shall be dismissed by such court for any informality whatever, but shall be tried on its merits; and the court shall allow all amendments in the form of action, the parties thereto, or the statement of the cause of action, necessary to reach the merits, upon such terms as may be deemed just and proper. The trial shall be de novo, including damages.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 16-15-729
Trial de novo on appeal — Decision on merits
Applied in 6 court decisions — leading case B & G Construction, Inc. v. Polk (2000)
Most recently applied in Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. v. Gilbert (July 2016)
Code 1858, § 4177 (deriv
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Tennessee Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Tennessee statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.