When you form a Hibernate Disjunction criteria, but don't add any clauses to it, you get a criteria that matches everything. Generally, when you perform a reduction over an empty list, the expected result is the identity element for the reduction. For example, the sum of the empty list is 0, the product of the empty list is 1, the conjunction of the empty list is true, and the disjunction of the empty list is false. Hibernate uses "1=1" as the SQL for both Conjunction and Disjunction criteria if there is an empty list of criteria. Seems to me that this is a bug, although Disjunction isn't documented, so who knows what it is "supposed" to do. Bill Pugh