Code of Virginia
The Code of Virginia is the
Publishing and access
The official version of the Code of Virginia is published by the
As of 2008[update], the printed Code of Virginia consists of twenty-nine hardcover volumes, with a two-volume subject matter index that is replaced annually. The statutes are fully annotated by Virginia attorneys, and include cites to and summaries of Virginia state and federal court decisions as well as
The government of Virginia claims copyright over the Code, including the text of statutes.[2] Individual preparers, however, may obtain rights over case annotations, indices, and various notes concerning sections and reference tables they have written.
The Virginia Code Commission
Originally created in 1946 as the Commission on Code Recodification to prepare what became the Code of 1950, the Virginia Code Commission was made a permanent part of the state's legislative branch and given the responsibility for publishing and maintaining the code.
The Commission is composed of ten members, chosen by statute[4] from the following:
- Two present members of the Virginia Senate, by the appointment of the Senate Committee on Rules for the length of their elected term
- Two present members of the Virginia House of Delegates appointed by the Speaker of the House for the length of their elected term
- Two former or present Virginia Circuit Court judges, appointed by the governor for four-year terms
- One former member of the Senate, appointed by the Senate Committee on Rules to a four-year term
- One former member of the House of Delegates, appointed by the Speaker to a four-year term
- The Virginia Attorney General (or an assistant Attorney General by his designation)
- The Virginia Director of the Division of Legislative Services
The Commission has full discretion to publish the code with or without annotations, "to fix the number of volumes; and to decide all questions of form, makeup and arrangement, including title pages, prefaces, annotations, indices, tables of contents and reference, appendices, paper, type, binding and lettering."[5]
It also has the independent authority to make minor changes to the code without ratification by the General Assembly.[6] Such changes include correcting "unmistakable printer's errors," misspellings, and erroneous cross-references, and updating obsolete references to renamed code titles, governmental officers and agencies. It may also omit provisions "which, in the judgment of the Commission, are inappropriate in a code, such as emergency clauses, clauses providing for specific nonrecurring appropriations and general repealing clauses."
Updating and revising the Code
The Virginia Code Commission is required to update the printed Code of Virginia at the end of each regular session of the General Assembly prior to the date new statutes and amendments become effective.[7] "Pocket part" supplements— stapled paper updates literally stuck in a cover pocket of the hardcover volumes—are printed annually. The pocket parts were originally issued biennially, and then annually once the General Assembly began meeting every year in 1970. Volumes are also periodically recompiled and reissued, which has occurred over a hundred times; each of the original volumes of the Code of 1950 has been split at least once into separate parts.
Since 1953, the General Assembly has revised the code on a title-by-title basis rather than enacting entirely new revisions of the code as it had in the past. The Commission has the responsibility for drafting title revision and recodification bills. More than 50 titles have been repealed and replaced by successor titles, and nine of those have been replaced a second time.
For example, the General Assembly repealed Title 63.1 in 2002 and replaced it with Title 63.2.[8] While the name (Welfare (Social Services)) remained the same, many of the chapters were modified. The Virginia Code Commission undertook the recodification of Title 63.1 in 2000 noting that such title had last been recodified in 1968 and during the intervening 34 years, "much has happened to affect laws governing social services programs and the two disability programs". The Commission rewrote and combined sections "to clarify provisions and to eliminate archaic, obsolete or redundant language" and made some substantive changes to "reflect current practices, delete eliminated programs, or conform provisions to other statutes and regulations".[9]
The Commission must also evaluate whether any statutory provisions relating to the revised title have failed to be implemented over the previous five years due to the General Assembly failing to appropriate funds, and to recommend that such provisions be repealed.[10] The Commission also makes annual recommendations to the General Assembly regarding which sections are obsolete and should be repealed.[11]
Legal supremacy of code provisions
The laws published in the Code of Virginia are supreme over local ordinances passed by the
In turn, the Code's provisions must comply and be consistent with the
The Code and the Virginia Constitution
The
History
Though compilations of Virginia legislation were published before the Code of 1819, these were organized by their date of enactment rather than by subject matter, and so lacked the integration of modern codes. The legislation of the Colony of Virginia was not even officially published for the first 175 years of its lawmaking history. Aside from original manuscript copies that were commonly misplaced or left to rot in county courthouses, information on new legislation was largely spread by word of mouth. Aside from a few collections printed in London, the first unofficial publication of Virginia laws was in 1733, when Virginia newspaper pioneer William Parks published A collection of all the acts of Assembly of Virginia.
Official action was not taken until 1808, after Virginia became part of the United States, when the Virginia General Assembly tasked William Waller Hening with the publication of the state's laws. His thirteen volume Statutes at Large (1809–23) was not comprehensive due to the loss of many records, but included all the session laws Hening could find dating from 1619 to 1792, as well as royal charters.[13] Many of these came from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson, who had preserved manuscript copies of legislation as early as 1734, and had offered to take on the task of publishing himself decades prior to Hening's work.
The Code of 1819
The Code of 1819 was the first codification in Virginia that organized the statutory law by subject matter. On March 12, 1819, the Virginia General Assembly passed "An Act Providing for the re-publication of the Laws of this Commonwealth," and the resulting Code of 1819 entered into force on January 1, 1820. The Revised Code of the Laws of Virginia: Being A Collection of all such Acts of the General Assembly, of a Public and Permanent Nature as are now in Force contained 262 chapters arranged in 23 subject titles and was published in two volumes by Thomas Ritchie, Printer to the Commonwealth.[14]
Several other states had already organized their codes by subject, but conservative jurists, such as those that composed Virginia's bar, preferred the tradition of dating public acts from the year of independence. Leigh accordingly wrote an apologetic note in his preface to the Code on this issue and retained the dates in the side margin.
The Code of 1819 mistakenly included the proposed
The Code of 1849
The Code of 1849 has been considered the most thorough revision of Virginia law to date. The General Assembly approved it in 1849, and it entered into force on July 1, 1850. The Code of 1849 contained 216 chapters in 56 titles, with individually numbered sections in each chapter. It also included annotations, in the form of footnotes that traced the development of institutions and legal doctrines back to the 17th century. It was nonetheless fewer than 1000 pages, something its compilers were proud of.
The Code of 1849 was principally the work of former
The 1849 revision was generally accepted as a modernization of Virginia statutory law and remained in force for almost 40 years, including during the temporary secession of Virginia from the United States during the American Civil War. It also became the first statutory law of West Virginia, when it broke off from Virginia in 1863 to be admitted as a separate state.
The code was updated in 1860 and 1873, but neither edition was adopted by the General Assembly as a revision. By the 1870s, the code had expanded to more than 1,500 pages and contained numerous redundancies.
The Code of 1887
In 1884, the General Assembly authorized a new code and appointed three revisors—two former and one future Supreme Court of Appeals judges—to correct contradictions, omissions, and other errors in the statutes "without producing a radical change in the present system." The General Assembly also required the sections of the new code to be numbered in one sequence, following the system adopted in 1873 by the Revised Statutes of the United States, which simplified citation to Virginia statutes. The revisors submitted the manuscript of their proposed code without having made any written progress reports, which the General Assembly passed without amendment with "An act to revise, arrange, and consolidate into a Code the general statutes of the Commonwealth," approved on May 16, 1887. The Code of 1887 went into effect on May 1, 1888.
The flaws of the Code of 1887 included its lack of provision for supplementation and an outdated index, and the only annotations were citations in the margins that lacked the names of the cases as well as a description of the rulings. John Garland Pollard, a private Richmond attorney who was later to serve as Virginia's attorney general and governor, corrected these errors in a series of privately published editions. His 1894 Amendments to the Code of Virginia was printed on slips of paper intended to be pasted over the amended sections. Four years later, Pollard published the Supplement to the Code of Virginia, which only printed amended sections and new laws, with new case annotations. In 1904, Pollard published the two volume Code of Virginia as Amended to Adjournment of General Assembly, which was the first printed Virginia code to be updated regularly, by biennials and supplements. It was also the first to include full case annotations that included summaries of the decisions, which more than half of those of other states had already published.
The Code of 1919
After nearly 30 years without an official revision, the General Assembly passed an act of March 21, 1914, that empowered the governor to appoint a revision committee. The appointed revisors—a private attorney, the dean of the
The code contained 63 titles, with 6,571 consecutively numbered sections, and was published in an oversized, unannotated single volume and a two-volume annotated edition. Neither version of the Code of 1919 had any provision for supplementation, and so the Code of 1919 quickly became outdated, so that as soon as 1923, the director of the State Legislative Reference Bureau published General Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia to incorporate amendments and assign section numbers to new statutes.
In 1924, the Michie Company published The Code of Virginia as Amended to Adjournment of General Assembly 1924, which was prepared by company founder and Supreme Court of Appeals reporter Thomas Johnson Michie. The Michie Code, as it became known, was supplemented after each session of the General Assembly, and a new edition was published in 1930, 1936, and 1942, by which time the one-volume code had grown to more than 3000 pages, and preparers had an increasingly difficult time squeezing new laws into the 1919 section numbering.
The Code of 1950
In 1944, the General Assembly appointed the Virginia Advisory Legislative Council to update the Code of Virginia with a view to emulating the multivolume, annotated codes that more than thirty other states had published by that time. The Council recommended a four-volume code, with provision for pocket part supplementation. The Commission on Code Recodification was created in 1946, and its proposed code was enacted by the General Assembly on April 6, 1948, with few amendments, and published in 1949 in ten volumes by the Michie Company. The Code of 1950 became effective on February 1, 1950.
In 1953, the Virginia Code Commission recommended that the General Assembly revise the law on a title-by-title basis (which was the method followed by the
Proposed Code of 2007
In 2005, the General Assembly authorized a complete revision of the Code, to become effective in 2007. Each section of the Code, like that of Georgia, would be designated by three numbers, separated by hyphens.
There was considerable outcry from practicing attorneys that they would have to relearn the designations of Code sections. In response, the General Assembly did not authorize any money in 2006 to pay for the recodification. This effectively put the recodification on hold, and it did not occur.
Titles of the Code of Virginia
Note: repealed titles have been omitted
- Title 1 - General Provisions
- Title 2.2 - Administration of Government
- Title 3.2 - Agriculture, Animal Care, and Food
- Title 4.1 - Alcoholic Beverage Control Act
- Title 5.1 - Aviation
- Title 6.2 - Financial Institutions and Services
- Title 8.01 - Civil Remedies and Procedure
- Title 8.1A - Uniform Commercial Code - General Provisions
- Title 8.2 - Commercial Code - Sales
- Title 8.2A - Commercial Code - Leases
- Title 8.3A - Commercial Code - Negotiable Instruments
- Title 8.4 - Commercial Code - Bank Deposits and Collections
- Title 8.4A - Commercial Code - Funds Transfers
- Title 8.5A - Uniform Commercial Code - Letters of Credit
- Title 8.7 - Commercial Code - Warehouse Receipts, Bills of Lading and Other Documents of Title
- Title 8.8A - Commercial Code - Investment Securities
- Title 8.9A - Commercial Code - Secured Transactions
- Title 8.10 - Commercial Code - Effective Date - Transitional Provisions
- Title 8.11 - 1973 Amendatory Act - Effective Date and Transition Provisions
- Title 9.1 - Commonwealth Public Safety
- Title 10.1 - Conservation
- Title 11 - Contracts
- Title 12.1 - State Corporation Commission
- Title 13.1 - Corporations
- Title 15.2 - Counties, Cities and Towns
- Title 16.1 - Courts Not of Record
- Title 17.1 - Courts of Record
- Title 18.2 - Crimes and Offenses Generally
- Title 19.2 - Criminal Procedure
- Title 20 - Domestic Relations
- Title 21 - Drainage, Soil Conservation, Sanitation and Public Facilities Districts
- Title 22.1 - Education
- Title 23 - Educational Institutions
- Title 24.2 - Elections
- Title 25.1 - Eminent Domain
- Title 27 - Fire Protection
- Title 28.2 - Fisheries and Habitat of the Tidal Waters
- Title 29.1 - Game, Inland Fisheries and Boating
- Title 30 - General Assembly
- Title 32.1 - Health
- Title 33.2 - Highways and Other Surface Transportation Systems
- Title 34 - Homestead and Other Exemptions
- Title 35.1 - Hotels, Restaurants, Summer Camps, and Campgrounds
- Title 36 - Housing
- Title 37.2 - Behavioral Health and Developmental Services
- Title 38.2 - Insurance
- Title 40.1 - Labor and Employment
- Title 41.1 - Land Office
- Title 42.1 - Libraries
- Title 43 - Mechanics' and Certain Other Liens
- Title 44 - Military and Emergency Laws
- Title 45.1 - Mines and Mining
- Title 46.2 - Motor Vehicles
- Title 47.1 - Notaries and Out-of-State Commissioners
- Title 48 - Nuisances
- Title 49 - Oaths, Affirmations and Bonds
- Title 50 - Partnerships
- Title 51.1 - Pensions, Benefits, and Retirement
- Title 51.5 - Persons with Disabilities
- Title 52 - Police (State)
- Title 53.1 - Prisons and Other Methods of Correction
- Title 54.1 - Professions and Occupations
- Title 55 - Property and Conveyances
- Title 56 - Public Service Companies
- Title 57 - Religious and Charitable Matters; Cemeteries
- Title 58.1 - Taxation
- Title 59.1 - Trade and Commerce
- Title 60.2 - Unemployment Compensation
- Title 61.1 - Warehouses, Cold Storage and Refrigerated Locker Plants
- Title 62.1 - Waters of the State, Ports and Harbors
- Title 63.2 - Welfare (Social Services)
- Title 64.2 - Wills, Trusts, and Fiduciaries
- Title 65.2 - Workers' Compensation
- Title 66 - Juvenile Justice
- Title 67 - Virginia Energy Plan
See also
Notes
- Reed Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-147 provides, in part, that "All parts of any code published or authorized to be published by the Commission, including statute text, regulation text, catchlines, historical citations, numbers of sections, articles, chapters and titles, frontal analyses and revisor's notes, shall become and remain the exclusive property of the Commonwealth to be used only as the Commission may direct." Due process considerations nevertheless require some extent of free public copying and distribution of the statutes themselves, though not necessarily the accompanying annotations and other material.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-146. Publication of Code of Virginia, Administrative Code, and Register of Regulations; authority regarding type and form.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-145. Virginia Code Commission; membership, terms; compensation; staff; quorum.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-146.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-149. Authority for minor changes to the Code of Virginia.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-148. Codification of session laws.
- ^ Virginia Acts of Assembly – 2002 Session – Chapter 747.
- ^ Senate Bill 303 – Reconciliation of Titlle 63.1; public assistance – offered January 9, 2002.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-152. Revision of the Code of Virginia; construction of statutes relating to titles amended.
- ^ Va. Code § 30-151. Ongoing responsibility for repeal of obsolete statutes and Acts of Assembly.
- Virginia Supreme Court.
- ^ Hening's Statutes at Large—an ongoing project to post the complete work online.
- .
- ^ The General Assembly actually never took action over the amendment, which the act of March 12, 1819 did not mention, nor did the act give any independent legal effect to subsequent decisions of the editors and publishers of the code.
- ^ Act of Feb. 20, 1846, ch. 33, 1845-46 Va. Acts 26, 26-27.
References
- The Statutes at Large of Virginia, Emily Croon. November, 1999.
- The Path of Virginia Codification, Kent C. Olson. Virginia Lawyer, February, 2000.
External links
- Code of Virginia from the Virginia Division of Legislative Automated Systems
- Virginia Decoded from Waldo Jaquith
- Virginia state codes from Socratek