Definition
A court order that nullifies, cancels, or sets aside a prior judgment, ruling, or proceeding. Vacatur wipes the slate clean — the vacated action is treated as void or as if it never occurred, rather than merely reversed or modified.
Vacatur arises in two principal contexts:
1. VACATUR OF JUDGMENTS AND ORDERS: A court's formal act of annulling its own prior judgment or order, or that of a lower court. This may occur on motion of a party (for example, where a default judgment was entered in error, or where newly discovered fraud undermines a final judgment), on appeal, or by operation of a settlement agreement in which the parties jointly request that the judgment be vacated as a condition of resolution.
2. VACATUR OF ARBITRATION AWARDS: Under federal and state arbitration statutes, a court's power to set aside an arbitration award on narrow statutory grounds. Under the Federal Arbitration Act (9 U.S.C. § 10), a court may vacate an arbitration award where it was procured by corruption or fraud, where arbitrators exhibited evident partiality or corruption, where arbitrators engaged in prejudicial misconduct, or where arbitrators exceeded their powers. This is a highly constrained form of judicial review.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An announcement in court that something is cancelled or set aside; an annulment.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An order of court by which a proceeding is set aside or annulled.
The gap between common and legal usage is modest but worth flagging: ordinary usage treats vacatur as roughly synonymous with annulment or cancellation. Legal usage carries the additional weight of precise procedural consequence — a vacated judgment does not merely lose effect prospectively, it is rendered a nullity, distinguishing vacatur from reversal (which corrects a lower court without necessarily erasing the record) and from modification (which preserves the underlying action in altered form).
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Common Confusion
VACATUR vs. REVERSAL: Reversal is an appellate court's determination that a lower court erred; it undoes the decision but typically remands for further proceedings. Vacatur annuls the judgment itself, leaving nothing to remand to. In practice the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in appellate opinions, but they are procedurally distinct: a reversed judgment may be reconsidered on remand; a vacated judgment is a nullity.
VACATUR vs. EXPUNGEMENT: In criminal contexts, vacatur of a conviction is sometimes confused with expungement. Vacatur of a conviction voids the conviction itself, typically because it was constitutionally or legally defective. Expungement seals or destroys the record of a conviction that legally stands. Many states have created statutory vacatur remedies for wrongful convictions or convictions obtained through duress (notably for trafficking survivors), which adds further complexity to the distinction.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter vacatur in at least three distinct research streams, and conflating them produces serious errors.
ARBITRATION RESEARCH: The most technically dense modern use of vacatur is in arbitration law under 9 U.S.C. § 10. The grounds for vacatur under the FAA are narrow and have been interpreted restrictively by courts, with the Supreme Court rejecting judicially-created grounds (such as "manifest disregard of the law") as independent bases for vacatur in some circuits. The Law Mind encyclopedia entry civpro_125 addresses this directly and should be consulted before drawing any conclusions from pre-2008 secondary sources, which reflect a more permissive doctrinal landscape.
SETTLEMENT VACATUR: When parties settle pending appeals and jointly seek vacatur of lower court judgments, the result is called "consent vacatur" or "stipulated vacatur." Courts have discretion to grant or deny such requests. U.S. Bancorp Mortgage Co. v. Bonner Mall Partnership (1994) significantly restricted federal courts' willingness to vacate judgments at parties' request following settlement. Researchers examining whether a cited judgment retains precedential value must check whether it was subsequently vacated by consent.
HISTORICAL SOURCES: The historical dictionaries treat vacatur primarily as a procedural device for vacating court orders and proceedings — the narrower Latin-root meaning. They do not address the modern arbitration vacatur context at all, which is entirely a creature of twentieth-century arbitration statutes. Researchers relying solely on Burrill, Rapalje, or early Black's for a working definition of vacatur will miss the most litigation-intensive modern application of the term.
CRIMINAL VACATUR: An emerging and legislatively active area involves statutory vacatur of criminal convictions — particularly for survivors of human trafficking who were convicted of offenses committed under coercion. These statutes vary substantially by state and should not be read through the lens of traditional civil judgment vacatur.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in close agreement: Black's (both editions), Burrill, and Rapalje all define vacatur as a rule or order by which a proceeding is vacated, with Burrill and Rapalje noting the Latin origin meaning "it is vacated." Anderson's offers the most compressed version — "let it be set aside" — reflecting the imperative form. Black's 2nd explicitly flags the Latin "let it be vacated," distinguishing the command form from the indicative.
None of the historical sources address arbitration vacatur, consent vacatur following settlement, or statutory criminal vacatur. The historical definitions are accurate as far as they go but describe only the procedural surface of what is now a substantively rich and contested doctrine. The Webster's 1913 definition — "an order of court by which a proceeding is set aside or annulled" — is a serviceable plain-English gloss that aligns with the historical legal dictionaries without adding analytical depth.
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Jurisdictional Note
Federal arbitration vacatur is governed by 9 U.S.C. § 10, but state arbitration acts (many modeled on the Uniform Arbitration Act or the 2000 Revised Uniform Arbitration Act) provide parallel or sometimes broader vacatur grounds. Researchers must identify which law governs the arbitration agreement before applying federal FAA doctrine. For criminal conviction vacatur, statutory grounds, procedures, and effects vary dramatically by state, and many states have enacted dedicated vacatur statutes within the last fifteen years.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
civpro_125: Arbitration — Judicial Review and Vacatur Under 9 USC 10–11 (Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia)
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