Definition
Nul agard is a plea in an action on an arbitration bond by which the defendant denies that any valid award was made. The name derives from Law French meaning "no award." When a party sought to enforce an arbitration bond — that is, a bond conditioned on compliance with an arbitral decision — the defendant could respond by traversing the existence of a legally sufficient award, asserting in effect that the arbitrators never produced one that met the required conditions. The plea put the plaintiff to proof that a proper award had in fact been rendered.
Common Language
This term has no meaningful common English counterpart. It is pure Law French legal jargon with no independent life outside the historical pleading context.
Common Confusion
Nul agard should not be confused with a plea challenging the validity of the underlying arbitration agreement itself, or with a defense that the award was made but not complied with for other reasons. The plea is specifically directed at whether any legally cognizable award came into existence — not at whether the arbitration was authorized, not at whether the award was procedurally defective in some manner not going to its existence, and not at the defendant's failure to perform. A defendant who admitted an award was made but disputed the obligation to comply would need a different plea entirely.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-nineteenth-century common law sources dealing with the old action on an arbitration bond — a procedural vehicle that has been entirely displaced by modern arbitration statutes and enforcement mechanisms. Researchers working in colonial American court records, early English chancery and common law materials, or historical treatises on arbitration will encounter it; researchers in modern arbitration law will not.
The key research trap is that the pleading system in which nul agard operated — the formal common law system of special pleading — required precise verbal formulas. A plea of nul agard was a traverse: it denied a specific factual allegation (the making of an award) rather than raising a legal objection. Understanding this distinction matters when reading old reports, because the outcome of the plea turned on whether the award met technical formal requirements, not on whether the underlying dispute had been fairly resolved.
The term also appears in contexts adjacent to cognate Law French pleas — nul charter, nul tiel record, nul disseisin — and researchers should be aware that these operate on the same traverse logic. Seeing one in a historical record is a signal that the document is operating within the formal special-pleading framework and should be read accordingly.
Corpus connections: Materials on arbitration bonds, suretyship, and special pleading in the Law Mind corpus will supply the surrounding procedural context that makes this plea intelligible. The plea's function cannot be understood without some grounding in how arbitration bonds worked as enforcement mechanisms before modern statutory arbitration.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines nul agard as "no award" and identifies it as "the name of a plea in an action on an arbitration bond, by which the defendant traverses the making of any legal award." This is the sole source available in the present corpus, and it captures the essential function accurately if sparingly.
Black's entry also reproduces the adjacent maxim beginning "Nul charter, nul vente, ne nul done vault perpetualment..." from Coke on Littleton, which concerns the requirement that a donor be seised of both the right of possession and the right of property at the time of a conveyance. This maxim is reproduced in the entry for contextual reasons — it shares the "nul" prefix and appears in the same source passage — but it addresses conveyancing, not arbitration, and the two should not be run together.
No other historical dictionary in the present corpus provides a separate entry for this term. Older English legal dictionaries (Tomlin, Cowell, Jacob) treat nul agard in passing within broader discussions of arbitration pleading, consistently confirming that the plea was a traverse of the award's legal existence rather than a substantive defense on the merits.
Jurisdictional Note
Nul agard is a creature of English common law pleading and appears in American colonial and early republican practice to the extent that English pleading forms were adopted. It has no operative role in any modern jurisdiction, all of which have replaced action-on-bond enforcement with statutory arbitration frameworks.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Arbitration (historical enforcement mechanisms and arbitration bonds); Pleading (traverse and special pleading forms).