Definition
In legal publishing and textual scholarship, an asterisk (*) is a star-shaped typographical symbol used in printed legal materials primarily to mark pagination references. In the context of historical law reports and treatises—most notably Blackstone's Commentaries and early American case reporters—asterisks were inserted into later editions to indicate where the pages of a prior (usually first) edition began. This allowed practitioners and judges citing to an earlier edition to locate the corresponding passage in a later one, and vice versa. The asterisk thus functioned as a cross-edition locator, preserving the integrity of citations across multiple printings.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A small star-shaped symbol (*) used in printing and writing for various purposes, including to refer a reader to a footnote or marginal note, to indicate omitted letters or words, or to mark a word or passage for attention.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The figure of a star, thus, *."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is contextual rather than definitional. In ordinary use, an asterisk points a reader to supplementary material—a footnote, a caveat, an omission. In its specialized legal-publishing function, the asterisk served a precise editorial purpose: not to add a note, but to fix the position of a prior edition's page break within the text of a later edition. A reader unfamiliar with this convention might mistake a starred reference in a historical legal volume for a footnote marker when it is actually a pagination landmark essential to accurate citation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus who encounter asterisks in historical legal texts—particularly in multi-edition works—should not treat them as footnote indicators by default. In reprints of Blackstone's Commentaries and in early American federal reporters, the asterisk marks the point at which a new page began in the first or an earlier edition. When a court cites "3 Bl. Com. 305," the asterisk in a later edition of Blackstone tells you exactly where that page started in the original, allowing you to verify whether the cited passage falls on the page a court claimed.
This matters practically because:
1. Quotation and citation accuracy. Judicial opinions from the nineteenth century routinely cite first-edition pagination. If you are working from a reprint or later edition, the asterisk is your guide to confirming whether a quoted passage genuinely appears on the cited page.
2. Distinguishing pagination markers from footnote markers. Historical volumes may use asterisks for both purposes. Context and placement—inline within text versus superscript near a sentence—usually distinguishes them, but researchers should be alert to ambiguity in older typesetting.
3. Tracing appellate reasoning. Cases such as Dermott v. Jones and Nash v. Towne, which turn in part on textual interpretation of treatise passages, may require a researcher to reconstruct exactly which text appeared at a given page in an early edition. The asterisk system is the tool for doing that reconstruction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the sole historical legal definition in the corpus, and it is precise: the asterisk "indicates the words at which the pages of the first edition of a textbook or volume of reports began." Anderson supports this with citations to reprinted editions of Blackstone's Commentaries and to several Supreme Court decisions from the 1860s through 1880s—Dermott v. Jones (1864), Nash v. Towne (1866), Gaines v. Miller (1884)—as well as the New York Court of Appeals decision in National Trust Co. v. Gleason (1877). These citations confirm that the pagination-marking function of the asterisk was a live issue in nineteenth-century appellate litigation, not merely a bibliographic curiosity.
Anderson's entry is brief and technical, addressing only this one specialized function. It does not discuss the asterisk's broader typographical uses (footnote reference, omission marker, emphasis), presumably because those uses were considered general knowledge unworthy of a law dictionary. Researchers should therefore not read Anderson's silence as a denial of those other uses—it is simply a law dictionary doing its job, recording only the usage that generates legal questions.
No other historical legal dictionaries in the Law Mind corpus address this term. The entry stands on Anderson alone.