Potential inconsistency in handling of timestamps

Hi,
  I am using PG-jdbc-8.2-506 to connect to a Postgres DB with a table
containing a timestamp column. Some entries for this are null. When I
try to retrieve the entries, I get a Bad Value PSQLException for rows
which have the timestamp set to null. I was able to trace it to
org/postgresql/jdbc2/Timestamputils.java: loadCalender() which
explicitly checks whether the timestamp has either a date or time
value, else throws an exception.

OTOH, setting a timestamp to null through jdbc (Update stmt) works
without error. This seems like inconsistent behavior.

Am I missing something? Any special settings for handling null
timestamp/date values?

Thanks in advance,
Vaibhav