[Latin, From the beginning; from the first act; from the inception.] An agreement is said to be "void ab initio" if it has at no time had any legal validity. A party may be said to be a trespasser, an estate said to be good, an agreement or deed said to be void, or a marriage or act said to be unlawful, ab initio. Contrasted in this sense with ex post facto, or with postea.

The illegality of the conduct or the revelation of the real facts makes the entire situation illegal ab initio (from the beginning), not just from the time the wrongful behavior occurs. A person who enters property under the authority of law but who then by misconduct abuses his or her right to be on the property is considered a trespasser ab initio. If a sheriff enters property under the authority of a court order requiring him to seize a valuable painting, but instead he takes an expensive marble sculpture, he would be a trespasser from the beginning. Since the officer abused his authority, a court would presume that he intended from the outset to use that authority as a cloak from under which to enter the property for a wrongful purpose. This theory, used to correct abuses by public officers, has largely fallen into disuse.

Latin Phrase: ab initio

From the beginning.

WordNet: ab initio

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The adverb has one meaning:

Meaning #1: at the beginning
Synonyms: initially, at first, at the start

Wikipedia: ab initio

The Latin term ab initio means from the beginning and is used in several contexts:

when describing literature: told from the beginning as opposed to in medias res (meaning starting in the middle of the story)

as a legal term: refers to something being the case from the start or from the instant of the act, rather than from when the court declared it so. A judicial declaration of the invalidity of a marriage ab initio is a nullity.

in science: A calculation is said to be "ab initio" (or "from first principles") if it relies on basic and established laws of nature without additional assumptions or special models.

For example, an ab initio calculation of the properties of liquid water might start with the properties of the constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms and the laws of electrodynamics. From these basics, the properties of isolated individual water molecules would be derived, followed by computations of the interactions of larger and larger groups of water molecules, until the bulk properties of water had been determined.

in chemistry: an abbreviation referring to ab initio quantum chemistry methods
in biophysics: a method for the prediction of protein structures in protein folding
in aviation: The very first stage of flight training.

as part of some educational qualifications: foreign languages may be taken ab initio - for beginners.

in extract, transform, load: Ab Initio is a tool used to manipulate data.

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Copyrights:

		Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Law Encyclopedia. West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Copyright © 1998 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Latin Phrase. © 1999-2008 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ab initio". Read more

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