Definition
An adjective with broad and pervasive legal use, signifying that something attaches to, belongs to, or operates against a specific human being rather than a thing, a place, or the public at large. Because "personal" rarely stands alone as a legal term of art — it almost always modifies another noun — its meaning shifts significantly depending on context. Three principal legal uses can be identified:
1. Relating to the individual person. A right, obligation, liability, or disability described as personal is one that inheres in a specific individual and cannot be transferred, assigned, or enforced by or against anyone else. A personal contract is one in which the identity of the parties is material to performance. A personal privilege exists for the benefit of the holder alone.
2. Relating to movable property, as opposed to real property. "Personal" in this sense draws the foundational common-law distinction between things real (land and that which is attached to or connected with land) and things personal (chattels, goods, and other movable or intangible property). This use survives prominently in the compound "personal property."
3. Against the person. A personal action is one brought to enforce a right or recover damages directly against a defendant's obligation or conduct, as opposed to a real action brought to recover land or other specific real property. A personal judgment binds the defendant personally and may be enforced against the defendant's general assets.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Pertaining to a particular person; relating to or affecting an individual; dealing with subjects one wishes to keep private; pertaining to the body or physical appearance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Pertaining to human beings as distinct from things"; "of or pertaining to a particular person; relating to, or affecting, an individual, or each of many individuals; peculiar or proper to private concerns; not public or general."
The gap between common and legal meaning is modest in isolation but becomes significant when "personal" is used as a compound modifier. Ordinary usage treats "personal" primarily as the opposite of "shared" or "public." Legal usage treats it additionally as the opposite of "real" (in the property sense) — a usage entirely absent from common speech, where no one would intuit that a bank account is "personal" because it is not land.
Common Confusion
The most persistent source of confusion is the personal/real divide in property law. In common speech, "real" means genuine or actual; "personal" means private or individual. In law, "real" means pertaining to land (from the Latin res, thing, specifically immovable things), and "personal" means pertaining to movable or intangible property. A promissory note is personal property; farmland is real property. Neither label has anything to do with authenticity or privacy.
A secondary confusion arises in procedure: a personal action is not merely an action brought by or against a person (all civil actions are), but one that, at common law, was classified in the category of actions seeking monetary relief or performance of a personal obligation, as opposed to real actions seeking recovery of land. This procedural distinction has largely collapsed under modern codes but remains relevant when reading historical pleadings and treatises.
Why It Matters in Research
"Personal" is one of the most heavily compounded adjectives in the Law Mind corpus, appearing in dozens of distinct legal phrases. Researchers should treat it as a prefix requiring disambiguation rather than a freestanding term. The critical research moves are:
Trace the compound, not the adjective. When you encounter "personal" in a historical source, identify what noun it modifies before drawing any conclusions. "Personal action," "personal property," "personal contract," "personal injury," "personal judgment," and "personal liberty" each invoke different legal frameworks with separate doctrinal histories.
The personal/real property distinction has deep historical roots and generates significant terminological drift in older sources. Before the 19th century, the categories of "things real" and "things personal" governed inheritance rules, creditors' rights, and choice of law in ways that no longer apply uniformly. Historical treatises may describe the same asset differently than modern law would.
Jurisdiction matters for the personal/real classification at the margins. Some property interests — leaseholds, for example — were classified as personal property at common law despite involving land, because the action to recover them was a personal action. Modern statutes in many jurisdictions have reclassified certain interests, creating potential anachronism when reading older materials.
Personal jurisdiction is a distinct constitutional concept not covered by this entry. Researchers following leads on "personal" in procedural sources should move quickly to the PERSONAL JURISDICTION entry, which addresses the due process framework separately.
The corpus contains numerous entries in which "personal" signals the applicability of the actio personalis rule — that a personal action dies with the person (actio personalis moritur cum persona). This common-law maxim affected survival of tort claims and is frequently invoked in 19th-century sources even where it had already been partially abrogated by statute.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are consistent on the core definition but vary in depth and emphasis.
Black's (1st and 2nd Ed.) offer the same terse formulation — "appertaining to the person; belonging to an individual; limited to the person; having the nature or partaking of the qualities of human beings, or of movable property" — and signal its function primarily as a modifier by cross-referencing compound terms rather than developing the standalone definition. This approach reflects the word's actual legal function accurately.
Burrill is the most analytically precise of the historical sources, distinguishing two distinct uses: "belonging to, or following the person" (as in personal chattels) and "relating to, or affecting the person; against the person" (as in personal action). This two-axis framework — property classification versus procedural direction — is the most useful analytical structure for research purposes and maps cleanly onto modern usage.
Bouvier's entry is a bare redirect to "Things Personal," which is appropriate given that the word's legal significance emerges from its compounds. Rapalje & Lawrence similarly illustrate through examples (the personal contract, the personal injury) rather than abstract definition, which is characteristic of that dictionary's practice-oriented approach.
None of the historical dictionaries adequately addresses the constitutional dimension of "personal" rights or the use of "personal" in modern statutory drafting (personal jurisdiction, personal liability of officers and directors), where the term carries significant doctrinal weight that the historical sources do not anticipate.
Jurisdictional Note
The personal/real property classification is largely uniform at common law but has been modified by statute in many U.S. jurisdictions, particularly regarding leaseholds, fixtures, and certain intangible interests. Civil law jurisdictions (including Louisiana) use a movable/immovable framework that roughly parallels personal/real but does not align perfectly, creating translation problems when working across jurisdictional sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Personal Property — Intellectual Property as Personal Property (Overview) (property_138)
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Personal Property — Liens on Personal Property (Artisan's Lien, Statutory Liens) (property_141)