A brief explanatory note or summary printed at the beginning of a text, article, or legal case; a preliminary annotation.
Compound of 'head' (meaning beginning or opening) and 'note' (from Old French 'note', from Latin 'nota', meaning mark or sign). Originated in legal and scholarly publishing.
Legal headnotes are incredibly useful—they're brief summaries lawyers add before court decisions to help other lawyers quickly find relevant cases without reading the entire opinion.
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