Definition
Several actions are separate and distinct lawsuits brought individually against two or more defendants who are each liable to the same plaintiff on the same subject matter. Rather than joining all defendants in a single proceeding, the plaintiff pursues each defendant through an independent action. The actions run parallel in subject matter but are procedurally distinct — each defendant faces their own suit, with its own pleadings, judgment, and enforcement.
The concept is defined in direct contrast to a joint action, in which all liable parties are named as co-defendants in one unified proceeding.
Common Confusion
SEVERAL ACTIONS vs. JOINT ACTION: These are mutually exclusive procedural choices for the same underlying situation. When multiple defendants share liability on the same subject matter, the plaintiff must either sue them together (joint action) or separately (several actions). The choice carries consequences for res judicata, contribution among defendants, and judicial economy. Modern procedural rules — particularly joinder provisions — have substantially narrowed the circumstances in which a plaintiff can elect several actions over a joint one, because courts now favor consolidation of related claims.
SEVERAL ACTIONS vs. SEVERANCE: Severance is a court order splitting a single action into separate proceedings, typically for trial management purposes. Several actions, by contrast, are never joined in the first place — they originate as independent suits. The end result may look similar, but the procedural posture and the applicable rules differ.
SEVERAL LIABILITY vs. SEVERAL ACTIONS: Several liability describes the substantive legal rule that each co-obligor is responsible only for their own share of a debt or obligation. Several actions is a procedural mechanism. A plaintiff may bring several actions against defendants who are jointly and severally liable, or against defendants who are only severally liable — the procedural choice and the liability rule are distinct questions that researchers should not conflate.
Why It Matters in Research
The term appears most frequently in older common law sources and pre-merger procedural treatises, where the distinction between joint and several actions carried significant tactical and doctrinal weight. Under classical common law pleading, a misjoint — suing jointly when the action was properly several, or vice versa — could be fatal to the plaintiff's case. That consequence made the joint/several distinction a recurring point of litigation and commentary.
Modern researchers using the Law Mind corpus should note that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (adopted 1938) and equivalent state procedural codes largely displaced this framework by liberalizing joinder and permitting permissive joinder of defendants whose liability arises from the same transaction or occurrence. As a result, the term several actions appears far less often in post-1940 primary sources. When it does appear, it is often in the context of historical analysis, choice-of-law problems involving older judgments, or jurisdictions that retained common law pleading structures longer than others.
A researcher encountering several actions in a nineteenth-century equity treatise or early appellate opinion should be alert to the possibility that the procedural consequence being discussed — such as election of remedies, splitting a cause of action, or bar by prior judgment — may still have a modern analog even if the vocabulary has changed.
The term also appears in older insurance, suretyship, and property law contexts, where co-obligors or co-owners might be sued separately rather than together. Connections to severance damages in eminent domain proceedings (where the taking affects one owner's parcel distinctly from another's) use related but not identical vocabulary.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the foundational definition: several actions arise when separate suits are brought against each of two or more persons liable to the plaintiff on the same subject matter, contrasted directly with a joint action in which all persons are joined as defendants in one proceeding. The entry is compact and definitional rather than analytical, which is characteristic of Black's treatment of procedural terms in its earlier editions.
Historical legal dictionaries are largely in agreement on the core distinction. The term does not generate significant doctrinal controversy in the dictionary literature itself — the debate over when several actions were required versus permitted, and what consequences flowed from the wrong choice, was resolved at the case and treatise level rather than the definitional level. Researchers seeking analytical depth will find more in Chitty's Pleading, Stephen on Pleading, and equivalent common law procedural texts than in the dictionary sources alone.
One gap worth flagging: historical dictionaries define the term in a world before mandatory and permissive joinder rules existed as a unified framework. They do not address how the concept maps onto modern procedure, leaving the researcher to make that translation independently.
Jurisdictional Note
The practical significance of the joint/several action distinction varies considerably by jurisdiction and era. States that adopted the Field Code (New York, 1848, and its followers) began eroding the strict common law distinction earlier than those retaining common law pleading. Under the Federal Rules and most modern state equivalents, the choice is largely discretionary within the bounds of joinder rules, rather than a mandatory classification with fatal consequences for error.