Here we have a perfect example of organisms which has lost an ability to consume a certain chemical and thereby render the effect of the chemical null and void. From Phys. All outstanding consumer debt was declared null and void commercial debts were not affected , land was returned to its original owners and debt peons were returned to their families.
Taking all this into consideration, the qadi notified the plaintiff that his betrothal was not valid, and that the marriage contract is null and void. From the Cambridge English Corpus. In case the hadana according to these rules is given to a man, the limitation on his marriage to an outsider is null and void. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
What is the pronunciation of null and void? Browse nuke. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day kind-hearted.
About this. Blog Outsets and onsets! Read More. November 08, To top. English Intermediate Business Examples. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:. Free word lists and quizzes from Cambridge. Well, mostly. Law French was still the obscure, technical language of the legal profession, and it was contributing many terms of art of its own, particularly in property law: this is where property law jargon like estoppel , estate , and esquire come from.
However, even the lawyers eventually lost control of a tongue they didn't speak, and legalese became a complex argot of Law Latin and Law French terms swimming in a sea of ordinary English.
A conundrum. By , we have evidence that the courts were becoming recognizant of this troublesome state of affairs, as a Statute of Pleading was enacted "condemning French as 'much unknown in said Realm'" and requiring that "all pleas be 'pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, and debated, and judged in the English tongue. Still, all those terms of art couldn't be simply abandoned. So lawyers of the day simply did the next best thing: they imported synonyms acknowledged as "English" to accompany those technical terms, to give the "synonyms" independent legal weight in documents, and eventually, the combination of the two became phrases with inertia of their own.
Such as:. Ah, yes. The punchline. Null and void became a phrase of their own because the two synonyms from Latin were imported at different times into "ordinary" English. Early in the reign of Elizabeth I, null — with a long life as a negative in law French and in Latin — became an English synonym for the law's use of void. Another hundred years, and null and void were a team, null taking the place of other explanatory nothingness no value, no effect that had often accompanied void.
The combination stuck despite frowns in and out of the law. So it follows the same rule. Null and void is a semantically redundant phrase because it was formed as a compromised term of art, and has continued in this way for a long, long time. Do read it if you're interested in more. F'x's answer is completely correct with regards to the usage of the legal term "null and void": Both refer to the same meaning of invalidity. As best as I can tell, "void" is the most appropriate of the two to use if you want to trim your word count.
For everything else, however, the terms do have different meanings. Null means "empty" or "insignificant" and is used a placeholder for "nothing.
A void can mean an emptiness or chasm "Don't step into the void. It presents the idea of emptiness in the form of what happens when you dig out a hole: The hole's substance is now a "void. The difference between null and void as term for nothing stems from their place in physical space. A void is nothing but takes up space; null is nothing at all. In other words, you could measure a void but null offers nothing to measure.
Void also means canceled or deleted and, again, programming has a special meaning for the term void. Here are a handful of usages for both terms:. To summarize: The legal term of "null and void" means the same as "void. Browsing the Wikipedia disambgiuation pages for null and void is a good way to spot the number of differences between the words.
In law, void and null both mean invalid; not legally binding. It is common in legal terminology to throw in extra words in an attempt to cover as many cases as possible. For example, you always hear heirs and assigns in contracts concerning real estate:. An occupancy agreement must provide that it's binding on heirs, assigns, executors, administrators, and successors. This is the legalese way of making sure all bases are covered.
By saying null and void the originators of the usage were no doubt attempting to forestall any argument that null or void taken singly did not mean invalid in quite the right way, or was insufficient by itself to mean that, and that therefore a case could be made that a contract was still in effect.
A lot of litigation is predicated on arguing very fine points, and these include the meaning of words that may seem obvious to you and me. If one voids a voidable contract, the contract is not null. Where a distinction is drawn, a contract is 'void' if it does not bind the parties. A contract is 'null' if it has no effects whatsoever.
For example, say Jeff steals a widget from Mark and sells it to Jack. This contract is void because Jeff has attempted to transfer an ownership he doesn't have. But it is not null because it will affect what happens if Mark sues Jack to get his widget back or Jack sues Jeff to get his money back.
The terms are sometimes used interchangeably. But strictly speaking, one who avoids a contract has voided it. They generally do not nullify it. A divorce voids a marriage so that the marriage no longer continues to exist , but only an anulment makes it null so it has no consequences.
One refers to a contract that potentially was effective, but is made non-binding by action of some party. For example, if a party backs out of a sale before it is finalized, it - the contract of sale - is said to be "voided", and neither party is obligated by it.
A sale following false advertising is "voidable" - one party is innocent, and at their option the contract will either be enforced or not. Sale of property that the seller did not have title to is "null" -- the parties cannot make it binding even if all are aware of the fraud. In general no two words are perfect synonyms, and no word from another language or dialect is a perfect substitute. When words are used in a technical sense, the words in the special register in this case legalese specialize away from the usage in the general language, although generally some of the new import leaks back.
David Schwartz and Ben Voigt illustrate that there is a difference between null and void in the context of contract law, and as it pertains to general language this comes back to an extent, with null and the verb annul looking to the past and meaning "as if it had never been" and void and the verb void, and the related avoid looking to the future "to ensure it has no further influence".
In law, there is an aim to ensure absolute clarity, broadest coverage, and minimum of misunderstanding and absence of loopholes as Robusto points out. Using multiple near synonyms makes progress to this and combines all the shades of meaning, covering loopholes that any one alone might leave. The situation of transitioning between languages or systems, also specifically warrants this parallel transitional language, as Kelly Hess and Billare so well describe.
This parallelism of near synonyms is not only something that occurs in legalese, and not only something that we do with individual words. Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way. Love words? Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs.
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