Art. 5057.Headings, Source Notes, Cross References

Every article on this site is published under a heading, followed by source notes tracing its legislative history and cross-references pointing to related articles. Article 5057 tells the reader, and the courts, what weight to give all of that surrounding material: none, as a matter of substantive law. Headings, source notes, and cross-references exist for convenient arrangement and reference, not to state or modify a legal rule.

The operative text of an article, the sentences a court applies to decide a case, is what carries legal force. A heading might summarize that text imperfectly, or a cross-reference might miss a related provision, without changing what the article itself requires.

This Book itself supplies a real illustration. Chapter 5's official heading reads "Payment of State Inheritance Taxes," yet every article under it, Articles 5181 through 5188, addresses a litigant's privilege to proceed in a case without prepaying court costs due to poverty, not inheritance taxation at all. Under Article 5057, that mismatched heading changes nothing about how those articles operate. It reads as a labeling artifact, left over from an earlier version of the Chapter whose substance the legislature later replaced, while the operative text controls regardless of what the heading above it says.