Definition
A transitory action is a lawsuit that is not tied to a specific geographic location for purposes of venue or jurisdiction. The cause of action is said to "travel with the parties" — it could theoretically have arisen anywhere, because it is founded on personal obligations (debts, contracts, or wrongs done to a person) rather than on rights attached to a particular piece of land. As a result, a transitory action may generally be brought in any court that has jurisdiction over the defendant, regardless of where the underlying events occurred.
This contrasts with a local action, in which the subject matter is inherently tied to a fixed place — most commonly, disputes over rights in real property, where the cause of action is said to "lie in the county" and venue is fixed accordingly.
Common Confusion
TRANSITORY ACTION vs. LOCAL ACTION: These are the two poles of a foundational common-law classification scheme, and their boundary is frequently litigated. The distinction matters most for venue: bring a local action in the wrong court, and it may be dismissed for lack of venue regardless of the merits. The line is not always obvious. Trespass to land is local; trespass to the person is transitory. A nuisance affecting real property may be local; a nuisance affecting only personal comfort or health may be transitory. Researchers working in older materials should be alert to the fact that courts drew these lines inconsistently, and results varied by jurisdiction and era.
Why It Matters in Research
The transitory/local distinction is one of the oldest organizing principles in common-law civil procedure, and it shaped how lawyers chose forums, drafted pleadings, and structured venue challenges for centuries. Several research traps follow from this history.
First, the classification governed not just venue within a jurisdiction but also the ability to sue in a foreign jurisdiction at all. A plaintiff suing on a transitory cause of action in a state other than where the injury occurred was relying on the principle that courts of general jurisdiction would recognize the claim wherever the defendant could be served. Courts occasionally departed from this principle for claims they deemed too locally rooted, even when the cause of action was nominally personal.
Second, the line between transitory and local shifted with the expansion of statutory venue rules. Modern procedural codes — the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure chief among them — largely replace the common-law local/transitory framework with statutory venue provisions, but courts still invoke the older concepts when interpreting those statutes or when applying common-law choice-of-law principles. Researchers reading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century case law must be careful not to assume that a holding about "transitory actions" translates cleanly into modern venue doctrine.
Third, in historical sources the term appears in overlapping contexts: as a pleading concept (what must be alleged about place), as a venue concept (which court may hear the case), and as a conflict-of-laws concept (whether a foreign cause of action will be recognized). These are related but distinct questions, and historical dictionaries do not always keep them clearly separated.
Fourth, researchers working on personal injury and tort claims should note that the classification of torts as transitory was the doctrinal engine that allowed plaintiffs to sue for injuries received in one state by filing suit in another. This is the theoretical ancestor of modern choice-of-law analysis in tort cases.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary captures the basic rule cleanly: an action is transitory when "the principal fact on which it is founded is of a transitory kind, and might be supposed to have happened anywhere," and illustrates this with debts and contracts as paradigm cases. This formulation, which tracks Blackstone and the common law commentators, remained the standard textbook definition well into the twentieth century.
Bouvier's adds useful doctrinal texture, confirming that all personal actions — whether ex contractu (arising from contract) or ex delicto (arising from wrong) — are presumptively transitory, and that such actions may be maintained in a state other than the one in which the injuries were inflicted, provided the cause of action rests on "principles of the common law." This is the conflict-of-laws dimension that Black's leaves implicit. Notably, Bouvier's entry on "Transaction" in the same volume (concerning civil-law compromise agreements) is a separate concept entirely — researchers should not conflate the two when skimming Bouvier's pages.
Rapalje & Lawrence provides no discursive definition but offers an extensive citation apparatus, pointing to cases from Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania that defined "what is" and "what is not" a transitory action. This list is useful as a jurisdictional map of nineteenth-century American case law and signals that the definition was contested across states, not settled uniformly.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: they do not address the interaction between the transitory/local distinction and statutory venue reform. By the time most editions of these dictionaries were current, state codes of procedure had already begun to modify the common-law framework, and the dictionaries largely ignore this. Researchers should treat the dictionary definitions as the baseline common-law rule, then check whether the relevant jurisdiction's procedural statutes had already displaced it.
Jurisdictional Note
American courts never achieved full uniformity on which actions counted as transitory versus local, particularly for torts involving damage to property or mixed personal-and-real-property interests. Federal practice under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure largely supplants the old classification, but state courts in some jurisdictions still apply common-law local-action rules for certain property-based claims. Researchers working in state court or on pre-twentieth-century materials should check the specific jurisdiction's treatment rather than relying on any single general statement.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia: Premises Liability — Slip and Fall (Transitory Conditions) [torts_39] — relevant for the distinct (and potentially confusing) modern use of "transitory condition" in premises liability doctrine, which describes a temporary physical hazard rather than the procedural classification discussed here.