Definition
Latin: "No award." A plea in an action brought on an arbitration bond, entered by a defendant who denies that any award was ever made. When a party sought to enforce an arbitration bond — a bond conditioned on compliance with an arbitrator's decision — the opposing party could plead nullum arbitrium to traverse the factual allegation that an award had actually been rendered. The plea did not contest the validity of the bond or dispute the terms of any award; it denied that an award existed at all.
Common Confusion
Nullum arbitrium should not be confused with a plea attacking the validity or sufficiency of an award. The plea is purely traversing: it says "there was no award," not "the award was improper" or "the award does not bind me." A defendant who admitted an award existed but challenged its terms or scope needed a different pleading posture entirely. Researchers encountering the phrase in historical records should resist reading it as a substantive challenge to arbitration — it is a threshold denial of fact.
Why It Matters in Research
This term surfaces almost exclusively in the pleading records of early English common law practice and its American colonial and early republic counterparts, particularly in actions on bonds. Researchers working in pre-nineteenth-century court records, chancery proceedings, or early American arbitration disputes will encounter it in formal pleading entries, not in substantive legal argument.
Several navigational points are worth noting:
First, the plea belongs to the law of special pleading under the old forms of action. With the advent of code pleading in the mid-nineteenth century (beginning with the New York Field Code of 1848 and spreading across American jurisdictions), the formal plea of nullum arbitrium disappeared from practice. Researchers searching post-reform court records will not encounter it as a live pleading device.
Second, the term is inseparable from the procedural context of arbitration bonds — instruments that were themselves a distinct enforcement mechanism for arbitration before modern statutory arbitration frameworks developed. Understanding nullum arbitrium requires understanding how arbitration was enforced through bond actions rather than direct judicial confirmation, as is the modern practice.
Third, the phrase appears in clusters alongside companion Latin maxims in the historical dictionaries, which can create confusion in corpus searches. Black's and Burrill's both run nullum arbitrium directly into nullum crimen majus est inobedientia and nullum exemplum est idem omnibus without full section breaks. Researchers doing full-text searches should be alert to this editorial convention and not conflate these unrelated maxims with the pleading term itself.
Fourth, the underlying concept — that a party sued on an obligation tied to arbitration may deny the existence of the triggering event — persists in modern practice, but under entirely different procedural vocabulary. Modern analogs appear in motions and answers asserting that no arbitral award was issued, governed by statutory frameworks such as the Federal Arbitration Act and its state equivalents, rather than by common law bond pleading.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in full agreement on the core definition: nullum arbitrium is the plea of "no award" in an action on an arbitration bond. All three sources frame it identically as a traverse of the factual allegation that an award was made. Burrill adds the citation to 8 Mod. 212, grounding the plea in English case authority from the early eighteenth century, which Black's does not independently supply.
All three historical sources treat the entry briefly, reflecting the term's narrow procedural scope. None elaborates on how the plea was argued, what evidence was required to sustain or defeat it, or how courts resolved disputes about what constituted a sufficient award for pleading purposes. Researchers needing that depth must look beyond the dictionary sources to treatises on pleading and arbitration practice, such as Kyd's Treatise on the Law of Awards (1791) or Russell on Arbitration, both of which address the procedural mechanics of bond enforcement in greater detail.
A notable editorial quirk in all three dictionaries: the entry functions as a gateway into a string of unrelated Latin maxims beginning with nullum or nullus. This is a common organizational artifact of Latin-indexed legal dictionaries and carries no substantive implication about the relationship between these maxims and the pleading term.
Jurisdictional Note
Nullum arbitrium as a formal plea was a feature of English common law procedure adopted in American courts under the common law forms of action. Its practical scope was always England and those American jurisdictions that maintained strict common law pleading. Code pleading reform in the United States effectively retired the term from active practice by the late nineteenth century in most states.