Definition
Alia enormia (Latin: "other wrongs") is a formulaic phrase used in common law pleading, appearing at the close of a declaration in trespass to allege, in general terms, that the defendant committed additional wrongful acts beyond those specifically enumerated. The standard form ran: "and other wrongs then and there did against the peace," followed by a statement of resulting damage to the plaintiff. The phrase functioned as a catch-all pleading device, preserving the plaintiff's ability to introduce at trial evidence of collateral harms and aggravating circumstances that naturally flowed from the principal wrong alleged.
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Common Confusion
Alia enormia is sometimes misread as a substantive allegation with independent legal force. It was not. It created no separate cause of action and established no additional right of recovery standing alone. Its function was evidentiary and structural: it signaled to the court and opposing party that the plaintiff reserved the right to prove subsidiary wrongs connected to the main trespass without pleading each one with particularity. Confusing the phrase for a distinct pleading count reflects a misunderstanding of how common law declarations were constructed.
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Core Elements
For alia enormia to do its work in a declaration, three conditions generally had to be satisfied:
1. A principal wrong specifically pleaded. The alia enormia clause followed, and depended upon, a particularized allegation of the primary trespass. It could not substitute for a proper declaration on its own.
2. A natural connection between the general allegation and the collateral damages sought. Damages admissible under alia enormia were those that "naturally arise from the act complained of" — not remote or speculative injuries unrelated to the main wrong.
3. Proper formal language. The phrase was a term of art. Courts recognized it in its conventional form; improvised substitutes risked losing the evidentiary latitude the clause was designed to provide.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter alia enormia almost exclusively in historical common law materials — treatises on pleading, early English and American case reporters, and form books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several navigational points matter:
The clause is a relic of the writ system. Once code pleading displaced common law forms in most American jurisdictions (beginning with the Field Code in New York in 1848 and spreading through the states across the late nineteenth century), alia enormia lost its procedural home. Modern civil procedure does not use it. A researcher seeing the phrase in a post-code jurisdiction is almost certainly reading historical materials or an archaism carried forward in an old form.
Under alia enormia, evidence of battery of servants and similar collateral injuries was admissible. Bouvier notes this explicitly, citing Greenleaf on Evidence. This matters when tracing what a plaintiff could recover in early trespass actions — the clause expanded the evidentiary scope of trial without expanding the pleading.
The phrase marks the boundary between special and general damages in the older pleading system. Understanding what could and could not come in under alia enormia is essential for reading early damage awards correctly. Courts policed the connection requirement: purely speculative or remote harms were not rescued by the general clause.
Researchers working in early American or English equity materials should not confuse the trespass declaration context with equity pleading conventions. Alia enormia belongs to common law trespass; it has no natural counterpart in equity procedure.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the essential account. Bouvier situates alia enormia squarely in the law of pleading, identifies its standard form, and confirms that damages and matters "naturally arising" from the complained-of act could be proven under it — including battery of servants. The citation to Greenleaf's Evidence (§ 678) points researchers toward the evidentiary side of the doctrine.
Historical dictionaries generally agree on the mechanics. Where the sources are thin is on the limits: they describe what alia enormia permitted without much treatment of what it excluded or how courts resolved disputes about whether a given item of evidence was sufficiently connected to the main wrong. Researchers needing the boundary cases will need to move from dictionary authority into the treatise and reporter literature directly.
No common English dictionaries (Wiktionary, Webster's 1913) carry this term in any meaningful sense. It is pure legal Latin with no life outside the common law pleading tradition. The COMMON LANGUAGE section is omitted accordingly.
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Jurisdictional Note
The phrase originated in English common law and was carried into American practice wherever common law forms were retained. Its practical relevance ended jurisdiction by jurisdiction as code pleading was adopted. By the time the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect in 1938, alia enormia had no operative role in federal practice. State-by-state variation in the timing of code adoption means the phrase may appear as operative pleading language in some jurisdictions' materials well into the nineteenth century while being purely historical in others from an earlier date.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Law Pleading
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Trespass
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Damages (Historical)
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