Definition
Redundancy carries distinct legal meanings depending on context:
1. PLEADING (historical primary meaning): The fault of inserting superfluous, foreign, or irrelevant matter into a pleading or legal instrument. Redundant allegations are those that go beyond what is necessary to state a claim or defense — matter that neither advances the pleading's purpose nor responds to the opposing party's allegations.
2. EVIDENCE/PROOF: A distinction recognized in civil procedure between redundancy in allegations and redundancy in proof. Redundant allegations that are also descriptive of an essential element can create a fatal variance if the proof does not match them. Redundancy in proof — offering more evidence than necessary — generally does not vitiate a verdict or finding.
3. EMPLOYMENT LAW (modern, primarily UK and Commonwealth): The termination of employment because the employee's position has ceased to exist, typically due to business restructuring, closure, or reduced need for work of a particular kind. Redundancy in this sense is a legally recognized ground for dismissal and triggers specific rights, including notice, consultation, and statutory redundancy pay under applicable legislation. This meaning is dominant in contemporary legal practice outside the United States.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Redundancy means the state of being superfluous or unnecessarily repetitive; in employment contexts, it refers to losing one's job because the position is no longer needed. In engineering and computing, it means the duplication of components to ensure system survival.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Redundancy is the quality of being redundant; superabundance; excess; that which is redundant or in excess.
The gap between common and legal meaning runs in two directions. In the pleading sense, the legal definition is narrower and more technical than the ordinary sense — not mere repetition, but the insertion of matter foreign to the instrument's purpose, with procedural consequences attached. In the employment sense, the legal meaning is significantly more precise than ordinary usage: redundancy is not simply being laid off but a legally defined category of dismissal with specific qualifying conditions, protections, and statutory obligations that vary by jurisdiction.
Common Confusion
Redundancy and surplusage are closely related but not always interchangeable. Surplusage is broader — it covers any unnecessary matter in a pleading or instrument, including matter that is merely repetitive or harmless. Redundancy in the strict pleading sense emphasizes matter that is foreign or extraneous to the pleading's purpose, not simply excess verbiage. The practical importance of the distinction lies in consequences: courts may disregard surplusage without prejudice to a party, but redundant allegations that are descriptive of an essential element of a claim or defense can create a variance problem if the proof does not support them. Redundancy should also not be confused with impertinence, which in equity practice referred specifically to matter offensive or scandalous to the court rather than merely irrelevant.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers face a significant vocabulary fork. Legal sources before the mid-twentieth century use redundancy almost exclusively in the pleading sense. Modern sources — especially from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and other common law jurisdictions — use it almost exclusively in the employment law sense. A researcher encountering the term must anchor it firmly to its period and jurisdiction before relying on any definition.
In historical pleading research, the distinction Anderson draws between redundancy in allegations and redundancy in proof is critical and often overlooked. Failing to track this distinction can lead to misreading older cases about variance and the consequences of over-pleading. When redundant allegations are also descriptive of an essential element — for example, a specific time or place attached to an averment of injury — the surplus description becomes part of the legal standard against which proof is measured. Older practice manuals and equity treatises are the best sources for working through how courts handled motions to strike redundant matter.
In employment law research, redundancy has a precise statutory definition in UK law (Employment Rights Act 1996, s. 139) that researchers must consult directly rather than relying on dictionary definitions. Commonwealth jurisdictions have divergent statutory schemes, and US federal and state law does not use the term redundancy as a legal category — US researchers should look instead to terms such as layoff, reduction in force, and WARN Act obligations.
Corpus researchers should be alert to false cognates: a nineteenth-century treatise discussing redundancy in pleadings has no bearing on modern redundancy pay calculations, and vice versa.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the pleading definition as the primary legal meaning. Black's (both editions) frames redundancy as a fault — a procedural defect — rather than a neutral description, which signals its practical consequence in practice. The 2nd edition's case citations (Carpenter v. Reynolds; Carpenter v. West; Bowman v. Sheldon) confirm the term was litigated in both Wisconsin and New York courts in the context of pleading objections, though researchers should verify the procedural posture of each before relying on them.
Bouvier adds the equity dimension: in chancery practice, a respondent's answer could not insert matter foreign to the bill even if that matter might have been admissible through a separate plea. This equity-specific rule distinguishes redundancy in chancery answers from redundancy in common law pleadings, a distinction that neither Black's edition makes explicit. Anderson's contribution is the most analytically useful of the historical sources — the allegation-versus-proof distinction he identifies is the one point where redundancy has real doctrinal teeth rather than merely aesthetic consequences.
None of the historical dictionaries anticipate or address the employment law meaning, which developed as a statutory concept in the twentieth century and would require consultation of entirely different source material.
Jurisdictional Note
The employment law meaning of redundancy is primarily operative in UK and Commonwealth jurisdictions, where statutory regimes define qualifying conditions, consultation requirements, and payment obligations. In the United States, the term is not a statutory category, and its employment law meaning has limited legal significance. For pleading purposes, modern US federal practice under Rule 12(f) allows courts to strike redundant matter from pleadings, preserving a thin thread of the historical meaning in contemporary American procedure.