Definition
A Latin legal term meaning to quash, to render void, or to annul. Used in old English law and practice to describe the act of setting aside a legal proceeding, judgment, or instrument — stripping it of legal force and effect. Derived from the Latin cassus, meaning void or empty.
Common Confusion
Cassare should not be conflated with cassat or cassatur, which are conjugated forms of the same root verb appearing in specific procedural contexts (cassatur meaning "let it be quashed," used as a formulaic endorsement on writs or pleadings). The distinction is grammatical rather than substantive, but encountering cassatur in a record where cassare is expected — or vice versa — can cause a researcher to misread the procedural posture of a document.
Cassare is also distinct from its English-law neighbor terms quash and vacate in one practical respect: when reviewing historical indexes and digests, quash is the term most likely to govern the relevant headnote or digest key, not cassare. Do not assume that searching cassare alone will surface all relevant procedural history.
Why It Matters in Research
Cassare is archaic procedural vocabulary encountered almost exclusively in early English legal records, Year Books, and Latin-form pleadings. Researchers working in medieval or early modern English legal sources — particularly records of the common law courts before the shift to English pleading — may encounter cassare where modern sources would use quash, vacate, or annul. The terms are functionally equivalent in most contexts, but the choice of vocabulary can serve as a dating and provenance signal: a document using cassare in its Latin form is almost certainly pre-modern and likely pre-eighteenth century.
The key navigational trap is treating cassare as a synonym for void ab initio. The term describes an act of nullification — something rendered void by judicial or official action — rather than something that was void from inception without any intervening proceeding. When a court cassavit a writ or judgment, there was an active step of annulment; the thing had legal existence before that step. This distinction matters when tracing the procedural history of a dispute in early English records.
Researchers using Law Mind's corpus should note that cassare and its conjugated forms (cassavit, cassatur) may appear in the body of writs, plea rolls, and procedural records where the indexed headword is quash or vacate. Cross-searching under both the Latin and English equivalents is advisable when working in pre-modern materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries show a clean convergence on core meaning. Black's and Bouvier's both define cassare as "to quash; to render void; to break," with Bouvier's attributing the usage to Du Cange's Glossarium — the standard reference for medieval Latin legal vocabulary. Burrill identifies the Latin root cassus (void) and situates the term explicitly in "old English law and practice," which is the most precise framing: this is not classical Roman law terminology in common use but rather the Latin procedural vocabulary of the English common law courts.
The Bouvier's entry in the source material contains an apparent editorial artifact — a lengthy passage about cashiers and bank authority that is plainly misattributed, likely a scanning or compilation error in the source text. It does not reflect any accepted meaning of cassare and should be disregarded entirely. Researchers relying on digitized versions of Bouvier's should be alert to this kind of corruption in OCR-processed historical texts; the clean definition ("To quash; to render void; to break. Du Cange.") is the authentic Bouvier entry.
None of the historical dictionaries discuss cassare's relationship to the distinction between voidable and void acts, nor do they address how the term interacts with later equity practice. These are gaps a researcher must supply from primary sources.