Definition
A voluntary nonsuit is a plaintiff's deliberate abandonment of a pending lawsuit before final judgment. When a plaintiff takes a voluntary nonsuit, the action is dismissed — typically at the plaintiff's own request or with the court's permission — and a judgment for costs is ordinarily entered against the plaintiff in favor of the defendant. The dismissal is without prejudice to refiling unless the applicable rule, statute, or court order specifies otherwise.
The term is closely associated with the older common-law forms of practice, where "nonsuit" was a formal procedural event with specific consequences. In modern practice, voluntary nonsuit has been largely replaced in federal courts and many states by the voluntary dismissal mechanism, but the term remains in active use in several state court systems, particularly in the South and in jurisdictions that retained code pleading traditions.
Common Confusion
VOLUNTARY NONSUIT vs. INVOLUNTARY NONSUIT: These are distinct procedural events that share a name but operate differently. A voluntary nonsuit is plaintiff-initiated — the plaintiff chooses to withdraw. An involuntary nonsuit is court-imposed, typically granted on the defendant's motion when the plaintiff has failed to present sufficient evidence to go to the jury. Conflating the two matters for research because the consequences, the grounds, and the historical treatment in primary sources differ substantially.
VOLUNTARY NONSUIT vs. VOLUNTARY DISMISSAL: In modern federal practice under Rule 41(a), the operative concept is "voluntary dismissal," not nonsuit. Many state codes similarly abolished the nonsuit label. A researcher encountering "voluntary nonsuit" in older sources should not assume it maps cleanly onto modern Rule 41 dismissal — the procedural prerequisites, timing restrictions, and cost consequences may differ. Conversely, a researcher reading modern state cases may find "voluntary nonsuit" used interchangeably with "voluntary dismissal" depending on jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap with voluntary nonsuit is terminological drift. Historical sources use "nonsuit" as a unifying label for several procedurally distinct events. When reading nineteenth-century reports or treatises, confirm whether "nonsuit" refers to a voluntary withdrawal by the plaintiff, a court-ordered termination for evidentiary failure, or a judgment entered after the plaintiff simply failed to appear. The distinctions carry different consequences for res judicata, costs, and the right to refile.
The without-prejudice default is not universal across time or jurisdiction. In older common-law practice, the right to take a nonsuit and immediately refile could be curtailed by the court or limited by local rules. Some jurisdictions imposed a "one nonsuit" rule, barring a second voluntary nonsuit in the same cause. Researchers tracing a case's procedural history should not assume that a voluntary nonsuit always preserved the plaintiff's right to bring the action again.
Costs are a recurrent issue in historical materials. The standard formulation — that the plaintiff agrees to a judgment for costs — appears consistently in Black's, Bouvier's, and allied sources, but how costs were calculated, whether they could be waived, and what happened when a plaintiff nonsuited after a jury was empaneled all varied. Trial-stage voluntary nonsuits sometimes required the defendant's consent or court approval, particularly after jeopardy attached in any sense relevant to the proceedings.
Modern researchers should note that "voluntary nonsuit" survives as a live term of art in Georgia, Texas, and several other states. Georgia's voluntary nonsuit statute (O.C.G.A. § 9-11-41) and Texas's Rule 162 govern the procedure in those jurisdictions and have generated substantial case law on timing, conditions, and the effect on pending counterclaims. When working in state-specific materials, check whether the jurisdiction uses the term actively before assuming it is merely archaic.
Finally, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry — fragmentary in this corpus — points toward an important substantive issue: intent. The note that "intention may even be inferred" connects to questions about whether a plaintiff's conduct short of a formal motion could constitute a voluntary nonsuit. This was a genuine issue in equity practice and in jurisdictions that allowed informal withdrawal. Researchers encountering ambiguous procedural postures in older records should be alert to this inference-of-intent doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in near-complete agreement, both defining voluntary nonsuit as the abandonment of the plaintiff's cause coupled with an agreement that judgment for costs be entered against the plaintiff. Both cite Bouvier's Institutes (3 Bouv. Inst. no. 3306) as authority, which confirms a shared doctrinal lineage rather than independent analysis. Neither source distinguishes carefully between the plaintiff's unilateral right to nonsuit and situations requiring court permission — a distinction that became increasingly important as procedural codes developed through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is too fragmentary in this corpus to yield a full synthesis, but the surviving language suggests coverage of the intent question — a nuance neither Black's nor Bouvier's develops. This is consistent with Rapalje & Lawrence's general tendency toward more granular doctrinal treatment of procedure.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the development of conditions on voluntary nonsuit timing (particularly post-jury-empanelment restrictions), the emergence of statutory limits on repeat nonsuits, and the eventual absorption of nonsuit doctrine into modern dismissal rules. A researcher relying solely on these sources will have an accurate baseline for pre-code practice but will need to consult procedural treatises and jurisdiction-specific materials for the full arc of the doctrine's evolution.
Jurisdictional Note
Voluntary nonsuit remains a term of active procedural significance in Georgia, Texas, and some other states that retained it through statutory or rule codification. In federal court and in states that adopted rules modeled closely on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, voluntary dismissal under Rule 41(a) or its state equivalent has replaced voluntary nonsuit, though older cases may still use the historical terminology.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No Law Mind Encyclopedia entry directly addresses voluntary nonsuit or civil procedure dismissal mechanisms. The matched entries (criminal intoxication, voluntary acknowledgment of paternity, voluntary relinquishment in adoption) share the word "voluntary" but are not substantively related and are not recommended cross-references for this term.