§ 1047.Successive Actions Upon Same Contract Or Transaction

Filing one lawsuit on a contract does not use up every future right that contract might create. Section 1047 confirms that successive actions can be maintained on the same contract or transaction, so long as each later action rests on a new cause of action that arose after the earlier one.

This matters most for ongoing or installment relationships, where a single agreement can generate separate breaches over time: a missed payment this year does not necessarily fold into a lawsuit already filed over a missed payment last year. Each new breach can support its own claim.

The key word is new. This section does not let a party split a single, already-existing claim into multiple lawsuits; it addresses claims that did not yet exist, because the triggering breach had not yet occurred, when the earlier action was filed.