Definition
A Latin term used in older common law pleading to denote a form of transitory action — one that could be brought wherever the defendant was found, as opposed to a local action, which had to be commenced in the jurisdiction where the subject matter was situated. The term appears in procedural contexts where courts were required to classify whether a cause of action traveled with the person (transitory) or was fixed to a place (local). "Gressione" is encountered almost exclusively in early American and English pleading texts and reports; it is not a term of active modern legal usage.
Common Confusion
GRESSIONE vs. LOCAL ACTION: The significance of gressione lies precisely in its opposition to local actions. A local action — such as one involving trespass to land — had to be brought in the county or jurisdiction where the land lay. A transitory action could follow the defendant anywhere. Rapalje & Lawrence flag this distinction explicitly. Researchers encountering the term in early American reports should treat it as a marker of the transitory/local classification problem, not as a substantive right or remedy in itself.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will appear almost exclusively in early nineteenth-century American reports and in treatises on common law pleading. Its presence in 2 Bibb (Ky.) 458 and 13 Mass. 354 places it squarely in the period when American courts were still working out the received English pleading categories. Researchers should be aware of several navigational points:
First, "gressione" does not denote a specific cause of action but a procedural classification. If you encounter it in an index or digest, you are looking at a venue or jurisdiction problem, not a substantive law question.
Second, the transitory/local distinction it signals had real consequences in early American practice: courts could and did dismiss actions for being brought in the wrong jurisdiction when the subject matter was local. Understanding gressione therefore unlocks a cluster of early venue and process cases that may otherwise seem puzzling.
Third, the term largely disappears from American legal writing after the mid-nineteenth century as code pleading reforms replaced the common law forms of action. In sources after roughly 1850, expect to find the underlying concept expressed through "transitory action," "venue," or "personal action" rather than through the Latin form.
Fourth, because the term is rare and archaic, full-text searches in digitized early reports will be unreliable — OCR errors are common in Latinisms of this type. Researchers should search variant spellings and consider proximity searches using "transitory" and "local" as companion terms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence is the principal historical dictionary source for this term, and its treatment is spare: the entry does little more than place gressione in opposition to local actions and supply two case citations. This brevity is itself informative — the editors treated the term as a known procedural marker requiring only a pointer to authority, not extended explanation. No independent definition or extended doctrinal discussion is offered.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any account of the term's frequency or distribution across American jurisdictions. The two cited cases — one from Kentucky, one from Massachusetts — suggest the term had some currency in early republic courts, but the record is thin. Earlier English law dictionaries (Termes de la Ley, Cowell's Interpreter) do not appear to have carried the term as a headword, which suggests it may have functioned more as a term of art in pleading practice than as a formally defined legal concept.
Researchers should not expect agreement or elaboration across other shelf sources; gressione appears to have been a term that practitioners recognized without felt need to define at length.
Jurisdictional Note
The surviving citations are from Kentucky and Massachusetts, both early nineteenth century. There is no evidence of uniform adoption across American jurisdictions, and the term does not appear to have entered equity or admiralty practice in any significant way.