Definition
A procedural device in common law pleading by which a plaintiff, in response to a defendant's plea, restates or reasserts the cause of action with greater particularity and certainty. The function of a new assignment is to clarify what the plaintiff's action was actually about — to show that the defendant's plea, while technically responsive to an ambiguous declaration, does not address the real claim the plaintiff intended to bring. By filing a new assignment, the plaintiff in effect says: "My action is not for the cause you have answered, but for this specific cause, to which your plea does not apply."
New assignment arose most commonly in actions of trespass, where a declaration might be worded broadly enough to encompass multiple possible incidents or wrongs, allowing a defendant to plead justification for one act while leaving the plaintiff's actual grievance unanswered. The new assignment cut through this by pinning down the specific occurrence or wrong at issue.
Common Confusion
New assignment has no connection to "assignment" in the modern contractual or property sense — that is, the transfer of rights, interests, or obligations from one party to another. The shared word is misleading. A researcher encountering "new assignment" in a pre-modern pleading record should not read it as involving any transfer of property, contract rights, or income. The term belongs entirely to the vocabulary of common law pleading procedure and has no transactional dimension whatsoever.
Why It Matters in Research
New assignment is a term that appears almost exclusively in historical sources and pre-code pleading materials. It is effectively a dead term in modern American and English practice, having been abolished along with the formal common law pleading system it served. Researchers will encounter it in:
— Reports and pleadings from English common law courts and early American courts, particularly in trespass actions from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
— Treatises on common law pleading, including Stephen on Pleading and Chitty on Pleading, which treat new assignment systematically.
— Early American state court records before the adoption of code pleading following the Field Code (New York, 1848) and its successors.
The principal research trap is the word "assignment" itself. Full-text searches across historical corpora will surface new assignment results alongside contract assignment and income assignment results, requiring manual filtering. Context is everything: if the document is a pleading, follows a defendant's plea, and concerns a restatement of a cause of action, it is a new assignment in the pleading sense.
A second trap is classification. Burrill notes that the new assignment was "sometimes termed a replication" because it followed the defendant's plea in the pleading sequence. Researchers searching for replications may therefore be looking at documents that functioned as new assignments, and vice versa. The distinction matters: a true replication answers the substance of a plea, while a new assignment sidesteps the plea by reframing the cause of action.
The new assignment also signals something about the underlying declaration: its presence in a record indicates that the plaintiff's original declaration was drafted ambiguously, broadly, or without sufficient particularity. This can be useful for understanding pleading practice and the strategic choices available to litigants in the period.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge closely on the definition and function of new assignment, with minor differences in emphasis.
Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence offer nearly identical language, defining the device as a plaintiff's reply alleging that the action was brought not for the cause supposed by the defendant but for some other cause to which the plea does not apply. Both frame it as a response to a plea that is literally responsive to an ambiguous declaration but misses the plaintiff's real claim.
Bouvier adds useful doctrinal texture, noting that the new assignment must be consistent with the general statement in the declaration — the plaintiff is restating with particularity, not changing the claim entirely. Bouvier also makes the evasive plea function explicit: the device exists to defeat pleas that "apparently answer the declaration, though it does not really apply to the matter which the plaintiff had in view." His example in the trespass context (truncated in the source material) is typical of how the doctrine operated in practice.
Burrill supplies the French law antecedent — "novel assignment" — and confirms the connection to trespass while noting the classification ambiguity around "replication." Burrill's entry is notable for containing what appears to be text bleed from an adjacent entry ("The term newspaper is popularly applied..."), indicating a typographical irregularity in that edition. Researchers consulting the original should be aware of this.
None of the four dictionaries address new assignment in any modern or code-pleading context, which is accurate: the device simply did not survive the shift to notice pleading.
Jurisdictional Note
New assignment was a feature of English common law pleading and was carried into American courts that followed common law procedure. After code pleading reforms swept through American jurisdictions in the second half of the nineteenth century — and more comprehensively after the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect in 1938 — the formal device ceased to exist. Researchers working in jurisdictions that retained common law pleading longer than others (some southern and mid-Atlantic states) may find new assignment appearing in records later than in code-pleading jurisdictions.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Note: The encyclopedia entries identified for this term (Assignment of Rights, Assignment of Income Doctrine, Landlord-Tenant Assignment and Subletting) address assignment in the transactional and property law senses and are not relevant to new assignment as a pleading device. No Law Mind Encyclopedia cross-reference applies to this entry.