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. 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.
Benjamin Watkins Leigh, member of the Virginia House of Delegates member and later reporter for the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, was appointed superintendent over the publication by the March 12 Act. The General Assembly, which provided him with an eight-page list of which laws to codify and expressly told him to ignore the date of enactment and categorize them instead by subject. Leigh was assisted by Hening. 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
Titles of Nobility Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, which would have been the Thirteenth Amendment had it been ratified. Modern-day proponents of TONA's enactment incorrectly point to its inclusion as evidence that Virginia had ratified it, but it was merely an editorial error due to incorrect information.
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
U.S. Congressman and acting
governor of Virginia,
John M. Patton, and legal scholar and
Virginia Supreme Court reporter Conway Robinson. They had been asked by the General Assembly in 1846 to "suggest such contradictions, omissions or imperfections, as they may perceive in the statutes" and to revise the code "in such as manner as in their opinion will render the said general statutes most concise, plain and intelligible." Patton and Robinson submitted five reports to the General Assembly between 1847 and 1849, and their work was finally adopted and passed by the General Assembly with only minor modifications. 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
Washington & Lee University law school, and a retired judge—drafted a proposed code that contained laws enacted through 1916, which was passed by the General Assembly with few amendments in March 1918. The Code of 1919 went into effect on January 13, 1920. 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
U.S. Congress when it revised the
United States Code) rather than a complete revision, and the General Assembly in turn gave the Code Commission the responsibility for drafting recodification bills. More than 50 titles have been repealed and replaced by successor titles, and thirteen of those have been replaced a second time. With change thus occurring step-by-step, the Code of 1950 continues to remain in force.
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==