Definition
In legal practice, "aside" most commonly appears as part of the phrase "set aside," meaning to vacate, annul, or nullify a prior order, judgment, or ruling. A court that sets aside a judgment treats it as though it never existed or suspends its operative effect. The term appears in procedural motions throughout civil and criminal practice.
As a standalone term, "aside" has limited independent legal meaning. Its legal significance is almost entirely derivative — it gains force from the phrases in which it appears:
1. SET ASIDE: To vacate a judgment, order, verdict, or other legal act. The court "sets aside" a default judgment when the defendant demonstrates excusable neglect; it "sets aside" a verdict when error requires a new trial. This is the dominant legal usage.
2. LAID ASIDE / PUT ASIDE: Occasionally appears in older drafting and equity practice to describe matters held in abeyance or reserved for later determination.
3. ASIDE (courtroom context): Historically, a remark made during proceedings not intended as part of the formal record — a judicial aside, counsel's aside — though such usage is informal rather than a defined legal term.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A remark made discreetly to a person nearby, audible only to that person; in theater, a brief comment by a character addressed to the audience and unheard by other characters.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "On, or to, one side; out of a straight line, course, or direction; at a little distance from the rest; out of the way; apart."
The common meaning captures the directional or theatrical sense — something spoken out of the main channel of communication. The legal usage carries none of this. When lawyers write "aside," they almost always mean "set aside," a term of art for vacating legal acts. A researcher encountering "aside" in a legal document should resist the theatrical or spatial reading and look to context for its procedural meaning.
Common Confusion
"Aside" is frequently encountered in older legal writing as shorthand within the phrase "set aside," and researchers sometimes read it as a standalone modifier rather than as part of a compound procedural instruction. The Anderson's entry — which appears to be a misfiled or corrupted entry referencing "ascertain" rather than "aside" — illustrates a separate hazard: historical dictionary entries sometimes appear under the wrong headword due to typographical or indexing error. Treat any anomalous historical definition with suspicion and verify against surrounding context.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research challenge with "aside" is that it rarely appears as a headword in legal dictionaries — it earns its significance through compound phrases. Searches for "aside" alone in corpus materials will return noise; effective research requires pairing it with "set," "lay," or "put."
Historical sources present a compounding problem: "set aside" language in equity opinions predates modern procedural codes and carries equity-specific connotations that differ from statutory vacatur under rules-based civil procedure. An equity court "setting aside" a transaction in the 19th century was exercising broad conscience jurisdiction; a modern court "setting aside" a default judgment is applying a specific procedural standard. The same words do different work in different eras.
Researchers should also note that the Anderson's source entry is plainly misfiled — the text defines "ascertain," not "aside." This is a known artifact of historical dictionary digitization and cross-referencing errors. Do not treat the Anderson's definition as authoritative for this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides no usable definition for "aside" as an independent term. The entry that appears under this headword in the source material defines "ascertain" — a filing or digitization error. This absence itself is instructive: "aside" was not considered a term requiring independent definition in classical legal dictionaries, confirming that its legal significance is entirely derivative of compound phrases.
Webster's 1913 captures the spatial and theatrical meanings with accuracy but offers nothing that maps onto legal procedure. The gap between the dictionary of general language and the dictionary of law is nearly total here.
Jurisdictional Note
"Set aside" carries consistent meaning across common law jurisdictions, though the procedural standards governing when a court may set aside a judgment vary significantly between federal and state courts, and between civil and criminal contexts. Researchers working across jurisdictions should not assume that the grounds for vacatur are uniform.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Motion Practice; Courtroom Procedure; Vacatur and Relief from Judgment