A vacated judgment makes a previous legal judgment legally void. A vacated judgment is usually the result of the judgment of an appellate court which overturns, reverses, or sets aside the judgment of a lower court.
A trial court may have the power under certain circumstances, usually involving fraud or lack of jurisdiction over the parties to a case, to vacate its own judgments.
A vacated judgment may free the parties to civil litigation to re-litigate the issues subject to the vacated judgment.
Convictions for some criminal offences in the US can cause those convicted to lose some civil rights which can be restored on vacation of the judgment.
Relief from judgment in the United States district courts is governed by Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit noted that a vacated judgment "place[s] the parties in the position of no trial having taken place at all." United States v. Williams, 904 F.2d 7, 8 (7th Cir. 1990).
A related concept in the UK is the automatic spent conviction for certain less severe criminal offences, introduced in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974; the conviction is not actually made void, but is considered to be spent after a rehabilitation period, and need not be divulged in most circumstances. If details of a spent conviction are made public by others with malice, the publisher may be subject to libel damages despite the fact that what is said is true. (By contrast, under United States law truth is a complete defense to charges of libel and slander; the only form of true statement actionable under U.S. defamation law is "public disclosure of private facts", which would be inapplicable here because the existence of the non-voided conviction is a matter of public record.)