Definition
MINUTE carries two distinct legal meanings, each operating in a different domain of legal practice.
1. Court record (practice). A minute is a memorandum of what takes place in court, made by or under the authority of the court. It is not itself the final record of a proceeding but rather the raw material from which the formal record is subsequently compiled. The clerk or prothonotary enters these memoranda in a minute-book as proceedings occur; the official record is later drawn up from them. In this sense, a minute is simultaneously a working document and an authoritative court artifact.
2. Corporate and deliberative bodies. By extension, "minutes" (almost always plural in this usage) are the written record of the proceedings of any formal deliberative body — a corporate board, a legislative committee, a municipal council, or an organizational meeting. These minutes document motions made, votes taken, and resolutions adopted, and they carry evidentiary and legal significance for establishing what was decided and when.
3. Measure (technical/legal). A minute is the sixtieth part of an hour or of a degree of arc. This meaning surfaces in legal instruments describing land surveys, easements, property descriptions using metes and bounds, and time-sensitive contractual or statutory deadlines.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A unit of time equal to sixty seconds; a short unspecified period; a written record of a meeting; a unit of angle equal to one-sixtieth of a degree.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The sixtieth part of an hour; the sixtieth part of a degree; a very small part of anything; a jot.
The common usage of "minutes" as a meeting record maps closely onto the legal usage for corporate and deliberative bodies, so researchers may underestimate the precision the legal context demands. In court practice, however, the minute is a term of art with specific procedural implications: it is a contemporaneous, court-authorized memorandum that precedes and generates the official record — not simply a summary written after the fact. That distinction, invisible in ordinary usage, is critical when consulting historical court documents.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Minute-book. The bound register kept by the clerk or prothonotary of a court in which minutes of proceedings are entered as they occur. The minute-book is distinct from the formal record of judgment and from the docket. In historical practice, these were maintained as separate physical volumes, and researchers must distinguish among them when consulting court archives.
Minutes of a corporate meeting. The formal written record of the actions taken by a board of directors, shareholders, or other governing body. These minutes, once approved by the body, constitute authoritative evidence of resolutions passed, officers elected, and authority conferred.
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Why It Matters in Research
The court-record meaning is the one most likely to trip up researchers working with historical primary sources. Older court files frequently contain distinct layers of documentation — the minute-book entry, the docket notation, and the engrossed record — and these are not interchangeable. A minute may capture proceedings that were never carried forward into the formal record, or it may reflect a procedural step that the final record obscures or omits. When a historical case record seems incomplete, checking whether a minute-book survives separately from the formal file can recover missing procedural history.
The minute-book as a physical object also has archival implications. Many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century courts maintained minute-books as the primary contemporaneous record, with formal records compiled later and sometimes with errors or gaps introduced in transcription. Bouvier notes explicitly that "from these minutes the record is afterwards made up" — meaning the minute, not the engrossed record, may be the more reliable contemporary source.
For property law research, the measurement meaning (one-sixtieth of a degree) appears constantly in metes-and-bounds descriptions in deeds, survey records, and land grants. Misreading the symbol (′) or failing to recognize "minutes" as angular measure rather than time can introduce significant errors in reconstructing historical property boundaries.
Corporate minutes function as the primary evidence of board authority in transactional and litigation contexts. When researching whether a corporation was authorized to execute a particular instrument, the minutes of the relevant meeting are typically the starting point. Gaps, irregularities, or post-hoc alterations in corporate minutes are recurring issues in fraud, ultra vires, and fiduciary duty disputes.
Burrill's entry, tracing a distinct Anglo-French meaning of "minute" as midnight, is a curiosity for legal historians working with very early English sources but has no continuing practical application.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree on both core legal meanings — measure and court memorandum — though they weight them differently. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier treat the court-practice meaning as primary. Bouvier is the most instructive: he clarifies that minutes are the precursor document to the formal record, and he attributes to Toullier the observation that they function as the raw material of judicial records (though the entry as excerpted here is incomplete). Black's 2nd Edition adds the minute-book as a defined subterm, which reflects the increasing systematization of court administration by the early twentieth century.
Burrill's is the outlier. Its entry focuses entirely on the Anglo-French etymological meaning — midnight, from "mi" (middle) and "nuyt" (night) — citing Britton. This reflects Burrill's orientation toward historical and comparative legal vocabulary rather than practice. The midnight meaning has no surviving legal significance and would mislead a researcher who encountered the word in that sense without recognizing its archaism.
None of the historical dictionaries addresses corporate or deliberative-body minutes as a distinct category, which reflects the relative underdevelopment of corporate law at the time of their compilation. The corporate-minutes usage is now probably more frequently encountered by practitioners and researchers than the court-minute usage, but it is largely a product of the development of modern corporate law and administrative practice after these dictionaries were written.
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Jurisdictional Note
The procedural significance of court minutes varies by jurisdiction and by court level. In some systems, the minute-book entry functions as the operative record for purposes of appeal timing and enforcement; in others, it is the formal judgment or order that controls. Researchers working across state court systems should not assume uniformity on this point.
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