Legal Definitions - joint and several liability

Joint and Several Liability is a legal principle that applies when two or more parties are responsible for causing a single, indivisible harm or injury to another person or entity.

Under this principle:

• All responsible parties are collectively (jointly) liable for the entire amount of damages.
• Each individual responsible party is also independently (severally) liable for the entire amount of damages.

This means that the injured party has the right to collect the full amount of their awarded damages from any one of the responsible parties, even if that party was not solely responsible for the harm. The party who pays the full amount can then seek reimbursement (known as "contribution") from the other responsible parties for their respective shares of the fault. This system protects the injured party by ensuring they can recover full compensation, even if some of the responsible parties are unable to pay.

Here are some examples to illustrate how joint and several liability works:

• Construction Site Accident: Imagine a construction worker suffers a severe injury when a scaffolding collapses. An investigation reveals that three different parties contributed to the accident: the company that designed the scaffolding (Company A), the manufacturer of a faulty component used in the scaffolding (Company B), and the construction contractor who improperly assembled it on site (Company C).

  If a court finds Companies A, B, and C jointly and severally liable for the worker's injuries, the injured worker could choose to collect the entire amount of their awarded compensation from just one of them, for example, Company A. Even though Company A might only be partially at fault, it would be responsible for paying the full judgment. Company A would then have the legal right to pursue Companies B and C to recover their proportional shares of the damages.

• Environmental Contamination: Consider a situation where a town's drinking water supply becomes severely contaminated by industrial chemicals. After extensive investigation, it's determined that two different factories, Factory X and Factory Y, operating upstream over several decades, both discharged pollutants that contributed to the contamination. It's impossible to precisely determine which factory caused what specific percentage of the overall damage to the water supply.

  If the town successfully sues both Factory X and Factory Y and they are found jointly and severally liable, the town could demand that Factory X pay for the entire cost of the cleanup, water treatment, and any health-related damages suffered by residents. Factory X would then be responsible for initiating a separate legal action against Factory Y to recover Factory Y's share of the costs.