Vacatur

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A legal mechanism that leads to the cancelation or annulment of a judicial ruling
2. The official setting aside or cancellation of a previous judicial judgment
3. A court's formal act of declaring a decision void or no longer valid

Etymology: The English legal term "vacatur" was borrowed directly from Latin "vacātūrus," meaning "about to be void." The Latin word is the future participle of "vacāre," "to be empty or free," and so it carries the sense of something that is going to lose its force. That gives the modern meaning a neat logic: a judgment that is vacated is one that is emptied of legal effect, set aside so that it no longer binds anyone. Lawyers kept the Latin form rather than translating it, which is why the word still looks foreign on the page. Its root, "vacāre," also gave English the everyday word "vacant," so a vacated ruling and a vacant room share the same idea of emptiness, even though one is about law and the other about space.