Definition
The act or moment that legally begins a civil lawsuit or other formal legal proceeding. Commencement of action marks the point from which a court acquires jurisdiction over the dispute, statutes of limitations stop running, and the parties' procedural obligations attach.
What constitutes commencement varies by jurisdiction and procedural system. In most modern American courts following the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure model, an action commences upon the filing of a complaint with the court. In some jurisdictions, service of process on the defendant — not filing — is the operative event. In older equity practice, commencement was tied to issuance of the original writ or subpoena.
The distinction matters most in three contexts: (1) determining whether a claim was filed within the applicable statute of limitations; (2) establishing priority between competing proceedings; and (3) fixing the date from which procedural deadlines run.
Common Confusion
Commencement of action is frequently conflated with service of process, but the two are distinct events. Filing commences the action; service notifies the defendant and brings them within the court's personal jurisdiction. Under the federal rules and most state equivalents, a plaintiff can commence an action by filing while still having a window of time — typically 90 days under Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(m) — to complete service. Missing the service deadline does not undo commencement, but it can result in dismissal. In older practice and in some current state systems, this distinction collapses because service itself was the commencement event. Researchers reading across historical and modern materials must not assume these terms are interchangeable.
Why It Matters in Research
The central research trap is anachronism. The moment an action "commences" has been answered differently across procedural eras and continues to vary across jurisdictions today. A researcher working with pre-code materials — common law pleading, chancery practice, or early American procedure — will encounter a world where the issuance or return of process, not the filing of a complaint, defined commencement. Applying modern filing-based assumptions to those sources will produce wrong answers.
For statute of limitations research specifically, commencement is the critical variable. Whether a limitations period was tolled or satisfied depends entirely on what act — filing, service, or issuance of process — the governing rule designates as commencement. Historical cases construing limitations statutes often turn on this point, and the rule in force at the time of the dispute controls, not the current rule.
In equity practice, the subpoena — the original writ summoning a defendant into chancery — served the function that a complaint filing serves today. Bouvier's entry reflects this directly: commencement was pegged to when the subpoena was sued out, returned, or placed in the officer's hands, not when any document was filed with the court. Researchers reading early equity decisions must understand this procedural architecture.
For corpus researchers, connections between commencement and related doctrines of relation back, tolling, and lis pendens are frequent and important. A case discussing when an action "relates back" to an earlier date necessarily presupposes a definition of when that earlier action commenced. Pull those threads carefully.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is spare but precise, and its precision reflects the procedural world in which it was written. Three propositions emerge: first, the date of the subpoena in chancery — when it was sued out and returned or placed in the officer's hands — marks commencement; second, the date of issuance of process is commencement in ordinary civil suits; third, service of a notice in ejectment constitutes commencement of that specialized action. All three propositions are consistent with a pre-code procedural system in which process, not a filed pleading, was the operative initiating act.
What Bouvier does not address — and could not have — is the filing-based model that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure would introduce in 1938 and that most states eventually adopted. The shift from a process-based to a filing-based conception of commencement is one of the major procedural transformations of the twentieth century, and historical dictionary sources uniformly predate or underrepresent it. Researchers should treat Bouvier's formulation as authoritative for its era and jurisdiction-specific for contemporaneous state practice, not as a statement of current general law.
The Kentucky citations in Bouvier (7 B. Mon. 314) anchor the entry in mid-nineteenth-century state court practice. This is useful context: commencement rules were not uniform even then, and researchers working in other jurisdictions should verify the applicable local rule rather than generalizing from Bouvier's Kentucky-sourced formulations.
Jurisdictional Note
Federal courts and most states now treat filing of the complaint as commencement. A significant minority of states, however, require service of process to commence an action for statute of limitations purposes — Massachusetts and Maryland are traditional examples. This distinction can be outcome-determinative in limitations analysis and requires jurisdiction-specific verification before any conclusion is drawn.