How Rule 19 Works

Required Parties and Nonjoinder

How Rule 19 Works

A plaintiff ordinarily decides whom to sue, and the law fences that choice in from both sides. An outer limit bars the pleader from including a superfluous party; an inner limit bars the pleader from leaving out a key player.¹ Rule 19 supplies the inner limit. Compulsory joinder is an exception to the usual practice that leaves the plaintiff in charge, and the exception exists because others, not named by the plaintiff, may be so closely connected with the controversy that it is desirable to have them as parties.²

Rule 19(a)(1) says who falls inside the inner limit. A person who is subject to service of process, and whose joinder will not deprive the court of subject-matter jurisdiction, must be joined if either of two things is true:

1. In the person's absence, the court cannot accord complete relief among the existing parties.³
2. The person claims an interest relating to the subject of the action and is so situated that disposing of the action in the person's absence may⁴ either impair or impede, as a practical matter, the person's ability to protect that interest,⁵ or leave an existing party exposed to a substantial risk of double, multiple, or otherwise inconsistent obligations because of the interest.⁶

Three interests stand behind those tests: the present defendant's, the interests of absent persons who might be plaintiffs or defendants, and the social interest in the orderly, expeditious administration of justice.⁷ The plaintiff, who shapes the complaint to suit her own interests, is rarely troubled by any of this. The defendant is another matter, because a defendant may fear conflicting injunctive orders or some strategic disadvantage when only some of the interested persons are before the court.⁸

The same concern for the whole lawsuit explains how Rule 19 fits with its neighbors. The First Circuit in Pujol v. Shearson American Express, Inc. described Rules 19, 20, 23, and 24 as aiming "to achieve judicial economies of scale by resolving related issues in a single lawsuit," while preventing "the single lawsuit from becoming fruitlessly complex or unending."⁹ Rule 19 therefore reaches the persons whose absence would defeat the purpose of resolving a controversy once, and courts apply it with restraint. Unlike Rule 20, which is liberally construed, Rule 19 is one that courts are frequently reluctant to apply to mandate joinder or to dismiss because joinder is not feasible.¹⁰

The inner limit matters because a judgment adjudicates the rights only of those before the court. One court, looking at a tenant that was not a party to its landlord's injunction proceeding, concluded that the tenant would keep every right under its lease. None of its rights or obligations would have been adjudicated in a proceeding to which it was not a party, so it would not be prejudiced in the way Rule 19(b) contemplates.¹¹ Rule 19 guards against the opposite situation, in which a stranger's stake is one the judgment would actually reach. Martin v. Wilks assigns the task of closing that gap to the litigants: a party who seeks a judgment that binds another person must join that person, and the person is under no obligation to intervene.

The first question in any nonjoinder problem is whether the absentee's stake is of the kind Rule 19 reaches, and the fact that the absentee could have been sued does not answer it. In Haas v. Jefferson National Bank, Haas claimed half ownership of 250 bank shares registered only in Glueck's name and sued the bank alone to have the shares reissued. Because the claim could not be decided without deciding who owned the stock, the question was whether Glueck, the registered holder, had to be brought into the case.

Both absentees could have been sued, and that fact decides nothing. What separates them is whether the claim can be resolved without resolving the absentee's stake. In Haas the ownership question runs straight through Glueck, while in the collision case a judgment against one driver leaves the other's rights untouched.

Each stage has a different character, and the later sections of this chapter take them in turn. The first stage examines the absentee's relationship to the dispute. The second concerns the reach of the court's power and the proper forum. When the absentee can be joined, the court must order joinder, and a person who refuses to join as a plaintiff may be made a defendant or, in a proper case, an involuntary plaintiff; the analysis ends there.¹³ The third stage arises only when joinder is impossible, and it is a balance that begins with how a judgment rendered in the absentee's absence might prejudice the absentee or the existing parties.¹⁴ An absentee who is not required drops out at the first stage, because the court never reaches the question whether the case must be dismissed if that person cannot be joined.¹⁵

Two vocabularies describe these stages, and older opinions use both. Courts still often phrase the first step as whether the absentee is necessary, although Rule 19 does not use that word.¹⁶ In Republic of the Philippines v. Pimentel the Supreme Court accepted the Rules Committee's statement that the 2007 amendments were stylistic only. The word required replaced necessary in subdivision (a), the factors were set out under separate lettered headings, and indispensable, a remnant of the pre-1966 rule, was deleted from the text altogether.¹⁷ The Court noted that even the lesser place the word held in the 1966 rule left it with the potential to mislead. Because the changes were stylistic, an opinion written under the old wording describes the same inquiry that the current rule prescribes.

The word indispensable now survives only as a conclusion. The Court in Provident Tradesmens Bank & Trust Co. v. Patterson explained that the decision to proceed without the absentee is a decision that the person is merely necessary, while the decision to dismiss is a decision that the person is indispensable.¹⁸ Because the label records the result of the balance, it cannot start the analysis. To say that a court must dismiss in the absence of an indispensable party puts the matter the wrong way around, since a court does not know whether a person is indispensable until it has examined whether the case can proceed without that person.¹⁹

The older approach sorted absentees into categories. "Necessary" parties were those who must be joined if feasible but whose nonjoinder would not result in dismissal. "Indispensable" parties were those whose joinder is compelled even at the cost of dismissing the action. The categories marked points along a continuum of the significance of each absentee's interest in the litigation.²⁰ The Rules Committee, explaining the 1966 revision, concluded that there had at times been "undue preoccupation with abstract classifications of rights or obligations, as against consideration of the particular consequences of proceeding with the action and the ways by which these consequences might be ameliorated by the shaping of final relief or other precautions."²¹ The current rule keeps the same design and, to some extent, the same tension, because a person who is required may turn out not to be required for the action to proceed after all.²² Calling an absentee required therefore establishes only that the first threshold is met, and it leaves open whether the case goes on without that person.

A defendant is the party most likely to raise a nonjoinder objection, and the usual vehicle is a motion to dismiss for failure to join a party under Rule 19, which Rule 12(b)(7) authorizes and a later section covers.²³ A court applying Rule 19 in a diversity case uses the federal rule rather than the forum state's joinder law, because whether a person should or must be joined is a procedural question.²⁴