The Code of Virginia is the statutory law of the U.S. state of Virginia and consists of the codified legislation of the Virginia General Assembly. The 1950 Code of Virginia is the revision currently in force. The previous official versions were the Codes of 1819, 1849, 1887, and 1919, though other compilations had been printed privately as early as 1733, and other editions have been issued that were not designated full revisions of the code.
Publishing and access The official version of the Code of Virginia is published by the Michie CompanyMichie's, or the Michie Company, is a national publisher of state codes. It was originally an independent company and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, the parent company of LexisNexis. under contract with the Virginia Code Commission, the governmental body responsible for printing and maintaining the code. West's Annotated Code of Virginia is an unofficial, competing version issued by West Publishing, which includes more cross-references and West key numbers. The Virginia government also makes the code available without annotations for free on the internet.
, the Code of Virginia printed by Michie's consists of thirty-four hardcover volumes, plus cumulative supplements. The statutes are fully annotated by Virginia attorneys, and include cites to and summaries of Virginia state and federal court decisions as well as law reviews. The first volume of the Code of Virginia also prints the Virginia Constitution and the Constitution of the United States.
The government of Virginia claims copyright over the Code, including the text of statutes.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. 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.Va. Code § 30-146. Publication of Code of Virginia, Administrative Code, and Register of Regulations; authority regarding type and form. It also has responsibility for publishing the Virginia Administrative Code and Rules of Evidence, as well as Virginia State Bar advisory opinions and Virginia compacts, which it may incorporate into the code. Though the Commission may arrange for the code to be published directly by and at the expense of the Commonwealth of Virginia, since 1950 it has contracted the task of printing the code out to the Michie Company.
The Commission is composed of ten members, chosen by statuteVa. Code § 30-145. Virginia Code Commission; membership, terms; compensation; staff; quorum. 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."Va. Code § 30-146.
It also has the independent authority to make minor changes to the code without ratification by the General Assembly.Va. Code § 30-149. Authority for minor changes to the Code of Virginia. 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.Va. Code § 30-148. Codification of session laws. "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.Virginia Acts of Assembly – 2002 Session – Chapter 747. 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".Senate Bill 303 – Reconciliation of Titlle 63.1; public assistance – offered January 9, 2002.
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.Va. Code § 30-152. Revision of the Code of Virginia; construction of statutes relating to titles amended. The Commission also makes annual recommendations to the General Assembly regarding which sections are obsolete and should be repealed.Va. Code § 30-151. Ongoing responsibility for repeal of obsolete statutes and Acts of Assembly.
Legal supremacy of code provisions The laws published in the Code of Virginia are supreme over local ordinances passed by the counties and independent cities of Virginia.
In turn, the Code's provisions must comply and be consistent with the Virginia Constitution, as well as the Constitution of the United States and federal law generally, and so its provisions are subject to invalidation by Virginia state or U.S. federal courts upon a finding that they are unconstitutional or preempted by federal legislation. Otherwise, Code provisions remain in effect until amended or repealed by the General Assembly. Changes are added through regular supplements and replacement volumes, rather than the issuance of a completely new code, which has only occurred five times.
The Code and the Virginia Constitution The Virginia Constitution, Article IV, § 12, which states that "No law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title", has periodically been used to attack the constitutionality of particular provisions of the Virginia Code on the basis that disparate subjects were codified under too broad or vague a topic. The Virginia Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected these arguments, ruling that § 12 does not prevent the Code from being organized around general subject matter, or require the Code to be a literal and detailed index of its contents. Instead, the purpose of this provision was to prevent the General Assembly and the public from being misled as to the nature of a law, such that "vicious legislation" was hidden by a "deceptive title."See Commonwealth v. Brown, 21 S.E. 357, 360 (Va. 1895), for the first interpretation of that constitutional provision by the Virginia Supreme Court.
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.Hening's Statutes at Large—an ongoing project to post the complete work online. 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.Ritchie was also the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, and a highly prominent spokesperson for the Democratic Party. See bio at the Library of Virginia .