[3] Thus, California case law interpreting those codes was treated as persuasive authority in Puerto Rico.
[3] However, although the Penal Code of Puerto Rico underwent extensive recodification and renumbering in 1974,[2] many of its sections still bear a strong resemblance to their California relatives.
[10][11] 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).
[8] Thus, as a practical matter, most of the real work was performed by the Legislative Counsel's deputies and then approved by the Code Commissioners.
[13] 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.
[10] The legislature also regularly enacts a variety of other resolutions which are not laws of general application, such as annual budget bills, appropriation bills for specific periods of time, acts authorizing the purchase or disposition of land by the state government, and acts authorizing the issuance of bonds which terminate automatically upon repayment of the bonds.
For example, in Li v. Yellow Cab Co., the Supreme Court acknowledged the Legislature's original intent in enacting Civil Code section 1714[14] 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.
As noted above, the Legislative Counsel maintains an online website with the official text of the Codes.
[10] In lieu of an official set, unofficial annotated codes are widely available from private publishers.