California Codes

The 29 California Codes currently in effect are as follows: ==Repealed codes==

The following codes have been repealed: ==Influence elsewhere==

The California Codes have been influential in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions, especially Puerto Rico. For example, on March 1, 1901, Puerto Rico enacted a Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure which were modeled after the California Penal Code, and on March 10, 1904, it enacted a Code of Civil Procedure modeled after the California Code of Civil Procedure. Thus, California case law interpreting those codes was treated as persuasive authority in Puerto Rico. In 1941, the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly joined the nationwide movement towards transferring civil procedure and evidentiary law into a system of rules promulgated by the courts, then abolished the judicial power to promulgate rules in 1946, then reinstated it in 1952 (subject to the right of the legislature to amend court rules before they went into effect). The Code of Guam, implemented in 1933 by Governor George A. Alexander, was modeled after the California Codes. Thus, Guam courts look to California case law to assist them with interpretation of the Code of Guam. ==History==

In 1868, the California Legislature authorized the first of many ad hoc Code Commissions to begin the process of codifying California law. Each Code Commission was a one- or two-year temporary agency which either closed at the end of the authorized period or was reauthorized and rolled over into the next period; thus, in some years there was no Code Commission. The first four codes enacted in 1872 were the Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Penal Code, and the Political Code. Statutes that did not fit these categories were simply left uncodified in the California Statutes. The four original California Codes were not drafted from scratch, but were mostly adapted by the Code Commission from codes prepared for the state of New York by the great law reformer David Dudley Field II. As a result of the Gold Rush, many New York lawyers had migrated to California, including Field's brother, Stephen Johnson Field, who would ultimately serve as California's fifth Chief Justice before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The strong New York influence on early California law started with the California Practice Act of 1851 (drafted with the help of Stephen Field), which was directly based upon the New York Code of Civil Procedure of 1850 (the Field Code). In turn, it was the California Practice Act that served as the foundation of the California Code of Civil Procedure. New York never enacted Field's proposed civil or political codes, and belatedly enacted his proposed penal and criminal procedure codes only after California, but they were the basis of the codes enacted by California in 1872. To staff the new permanent incarnation of the Code Commission, the state Legislature simply appointed the Legislative Counsel as the secretary of the Commission. The Commission spent the next 24 years analyzing the massive body of uncodified law in the California Statutes and drafting almost all the other codes. By 1953, when the Code Commission completed its assigned task and issued its final report on September 1 of that year, 25 Codes were then in existence. Instead, criminal procedure in California is codified in Part 2 of the Penal Code, while Part 1 is devoted to substantive criminal law. ==Interpretation==

The Codes contain, or are supposed to only contain general statutory law, with the emphasis on the word "general". to codify a contributory negligence scheme subject to the last clear chance doctrine, then held the legislature had not intended to freeze the common law in place and proceeded to judicially adopt comparative negligence. In contrast, other codes, such as the Probate Code and the Evidence Code, are considered to have fully displaced the common law, meaning that cases interpreting their provisions always try to give effect whenever possible to the Legislature's intent. As noted above, the Legislative Counsel maintains an online website with the official text of the Codes. The original four codes were printed as separate state documents in 1872 (but not as part of the California Statutes), and were also published by commercial publishers in various versions, including as a set in 1872. In lieu of an official set, unofficial annotated codes are widely available from private publishers. West publishes ''West's Annotated California Codes and LexisNexis publishes Deering's California Codes Annotated. Although Deering's is much older, West is the more popular of the two annotated codes. Libraries that lack sufficient shelf space to carry both codes—usually because they are small law libraries, public libraries serving the general public (as distinguished from public law libraries), or out-of-state libraries—usually carry only West and omit Deering's''. There are also a handful of relatively minor statutes which were never codified and are not included in the Legislative Counsel's online copy, but probably should have been codified as they are laws of general application. For example, certain initiative acts could not be codified by an act of the legislature because they were originally enacted by popular vote of the electorate. The final Code Commission report of September 1, 1953 recommended that such statutes should be published in an appendix to whichever code they are most relevant and not grouped into a separate volume. The unofficial annotated codes include those statutes either as appendixes to the codes in which they probably should have been codified, or within annotations to particular code sections; ''Deering's'' also prints the uncodified initiative acts in a separate volume. ==See also==