What term describes when multiple individuals are responsible for injury?

The term that describes the situation when multiple individuals are responsible for an injury is joint liability. This concept applies in legal contexts where two or more parties can be held collectively responsible for the harm caused to a plaintiff. In cases of joint liability, each party can be required to pay the full amount of damages, regardless of their individual share of responsibility, meaning that the plaintiff can pursue the entire claim from any one of the responsible parties.

Understanding joint liability is important in scenarios such as accidents resulting from the combined actions of several individuals, where each person's conduct contributed to the resulting harm. This legal principle ensures that plaintiffs can seek recovery in a more straightforward manner, as they are not limited to proving a specific allocation of fault among the liable parties.

The other terms do not accurately capture this concept of shared responsibility for a single injury in the same way joint liability does. For example, single liability refers to the responsibility of one individual, and concurrent liability may refer to situations where multiple liabilities exist but not necessarily in a joint manner. Shared responsibility could describe actions or duties among individuals but does not specifically denote the legal concept of liability in the same precise way that joint liability does.