Definition
Latin. "Jointly and severally." A phrase appearing in old English legal instruments, pleadings, and records to indicate that an obligation or liability attaches both to the parties collectively and to each party individually. When obligors are bound conjunctim et divisim, a creditor or claimant may proceed against all of them together or against any one of them alone for the full amount or performance.
The phrase is a compact expression of what modern law handles through the doctrine of joint and several liability: each obligor is fully responsible for the whole, not merely for a proportionate share.
Common Confusion
Researchers encountering conjunctim et divisim in early English sources should not confuse it with purely joint obligation (conjunctim alone), which binds parties together but may extinguish the claim against remaining obligors once one is released or judgment is entered. The divisim component is the operative addition — it preserves the creditor's right to pursue each obligor independently. In civil law sources, parallel phrases appear as conjunctim et disjunctim and conjunctim et separatim; these carry equivalent meaning but belong to a distinct textual tradition and should not be treated as direct translations of the common law term.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is almost exclusively a term of art in pre-modern English legal instruments — deeds, bonds, plea rolls, and law French and Latin records from the medieval and early modern periods. Researchers working in that corpus need to recognize it as the functional ancestor of joint and several liability rather than as a term with ongoing doctrinal life in modern sources.
Two traps appear in historical research. First, the phrase drops out of common usage well before the formal doctrinal vocabulary of joint and several liability is settled, meaning that a gap in the record does not indicate a gap in the underlying concept — courts continued applying the substance while shedding the Latin formula. Second, the civil law variants (conjunctim et disjunctim; conjunctim et separatim) appear in sources drawing on Brissonius and continental jurisprudence; these are not interchangeable with the common law usage and signal a different textual lineage. Burrill flags this distinction explicitly, and researchers conflating the two traditions risk misreading the authority of a given source.
For corpus navigation: this term will appear in Law Mind materials touching medieval property law, suretyship, debt actions, and bond instruments. It connects upstream to the broader treatment of joint and several obligation and downstream to modern co-obligor liability doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core definition: jointly and severally, used in old English law. Black's (both editions) gives the bare minimum. Burrill is the useful source here, offering record citations — Bracton folio 19, Dyer 62a, Yelverton 203, and Crabb's Real Property — that ground the phrase in identifiable legal texts and allow a researcher to trace its use across several centuries of English legal writing. Burrill also performs the valuable service of distinguishing the civil law variants, a distinction the Black's entries omit entirely.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any account of how the phrase functioned procedurally — what it meant in practice when a bond was drafted conjunctim et divisim, what remedies it unlocked, and how courts treated a release of one joint-and-several obligor. For that doctrinal texture, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf to treatise literature on suretyship and to the plea roll records the phrase inhabited.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase is specific to the English common law tradition and its historical records. It does not appear as operative language in American legal instruments of any period; American law absorbed the underlying concept through the doctrine of joint and several liability without retaining the Latin formula.