Definition
In old legal practice, a term of pleading meaning bad or defective. Applied to a plea, bar, avowry, or other procedural instrument to indicate that it was legally insufficient — that it failed to meet the formal or substantive requirements necessary to stand. A pleading or motion declared "naught" was, in effect, void of legal force.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Nothingness; alternative spelling of nought.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Nothing; also the arithmetical character zero (cipher). Used in phrases such as "to set at naught," meaning to treat as worthless or to defy entirely.
The common meaning of naught — literal nothingness or zero — is close to, but not identical with, its technical legal use. In pleading, a bar or avowry was not simply nothing; it was a thing that existed but was found wanting. "Naught" in legal usage is a judgment of deficiency, not an assertion of nonexistence. The distinction is subtle but matters when reading old reports: the court was not saying the pleading did not exist, but that it was legally bad and could not stand.
Common Confusion
Naught should not be confused with null or void, though the practical result may be similar. A pleading called naught was defective in form or substance; null or void terminology in later law often carries distinct meanings tied to voidability, ab initio invalidity, or statutory nullification. Researchers encountering naught in early English reports should resist importing later technical distinctions between null, void, and voidable — the old usage was simpler and broader.
Why It Matters in Research
Naught is a relic of early English common law pleading and appears almost exclusively in pre-eighteenth-century English reports. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus will encounter it in old Year Book-style reports and the early volumes of the Modern Reports series (cited in the historical dictionaries as 5 Mod., 10 Mod., 11 Mod., and 1 Leon.). It is not a term that survived into American practice in any meaningful doctrinal form.
The key navigational point: when reading early English pleading cases and a court or counsel declares that a plea, bar, or avowry is naught, this is a conclusion of legal insufficiency — equivalent to what later practice would express as sustaining a demurrer, finding a pleading defective on its face, or striking a defense as legally inadequate. Translating naught into modern conceptual vocabulary requires attention to context: Was the defect formal (a pleading vice)? Substantive (the legal theory did not hold)? The old reports rarely spell this out the way modern opinions do.
Burrill notes that naught was sometimes written naughty — a variant that will strike modern readers as jarring but that carried no moral connotation whatsoever in legal usage. If a researcher encounters "the plea is naughty" in a Brownlow and Goldesborough report or similar early source, it means precisely the same thing: the plea is bad and defective.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree entirely: naught means bad or defective in old practice. Black's (both editions) and Burrill provide the same illustrative quotations from the reports — the bar is naught (1 Leon. 77), the avowry is naught (5 Mod. 73), the plea is undoubtedly naught (10 Mod. 329) — and Burrill attributes the last to Eyre C.J., which is useful for placing the usage within a recognizable judicial voice. Bouvier's entry is spare to the point of minimalism: simply "bad; defective," with no further elaboration or citation.
None of the historical dictionaries attempt to connect naught to later pleading doctrine or to provide any synthesis with the American practice context in which their readers were operating. For Black's and Bouvier's, this is an acknowledged historical curiosity, not a living term. The dictionaries are therefore useful primarily as confirmation that the term is archaic and as pointers to the English report citations where it appears in context.
Jurisdictional Note
Naught as a term of art did not cross into American legal usage in any documented doctrinal form. It is an English common law pleading term belonging to a period predating the American legal system. Researchers should not expect to find it in American case law or statutes.