Definition
A Latin term of medieval legal Latin meaning "to annul" or "to reduce to nothing." Used in historical legal instruments and pleadings to express the act of declaring something void, of no force, or without legal effect. Functionally equivalent to annulling a judgment, instrument, deed, or legal proceeding — rendering it as though it never existed.
Common Confusion
ADNULLARE vs. ADNIHILARE: Burrill treats these terms as interchangeable, directing readers from ADNULLARE to ADNIHILARE. The distinction, to the extent one exists, is more linguistic than legal: adnihilare carries the stronger connotation of reducing something to nothing (nihil), while adnullare tracks more closely to the concept of nullity (nullus). In practice, historical sources use them without meaningful differentiation. Researchers encountering either term in a medieval or early modern document should treat them as synonyms unless context suggests otherwise.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of art found almost exclusively in Latin legal instruments, pleadings, and formularies of the medieval and early modern periods. It will appear in English legal records written in Law Latin — the hybrid Latin used in English courts prior to the Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act 1731, which required court proceedings in England to be conducted in English. Any document from English ecclesiastical courts, chancery proceedings, or formal deeds predating the eighteenth century may contain this term.
Researchers should note two practical traps. First, adnullare is a verb form; it may appear in various conjugations (adnullatur, adnullatum, adnullavit, adnullentur) in source documents, and recognizing the root is essential to correct translation. Second, the substantive legal concept it describes — annulment, voidance, nullification — persists in modern law under entirely different vocabulary. When tracing a doctrine of nullity or voidness across historical sources, adnullare is a likely carrier of that doctrine in pre-eighteenth-century sources and should be mapped onto modern concepts accordingly.
The term also appears in canon law contexts, particularly in the annulment of marriages and the invalidation of ecclesiastical instruments. Researchers working in ecclesiastical law or legal history of marriage should cross-reference adnullare with the broader canon law vocabulary of nullity.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides only a minimal entry — "L. Lat. To annul" — and immediately redirects to ADNIHILARE, suggesting that in Burrill's estimation the two terms are functionally identical and that adnihilare was the more commonly encountered form in the sources available to him. This is consistent with the general pattern in Law Latin lexicography: minor variants in Latinate legal terms were often treated as equivalents rather than distinguished with precision.
The brevity of Burrill's entry is itself informative. It signals that adnullare was not a term that generated significant doctrinal commentary or controversy in the Anglo-American legal tradition — it was a formulaic word of drafting rather than a term carrying contested legal meaning. Researchers should not expect to find extended judicial interpretation of the term itself; its significance lies in identifying what legal act a historical document was accomplishing, not in any independent doctrinal content.
No other Law Mind shelf sources provide entries for this term, which limits the ability to triangulate meaning across dictionaries. For deeper treatment, researchers should consult specialized Law Latin glossaries, particularly Du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, which provides broader medieval Latin context than common-law dictionaries.