Code of Virginia
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.
[2] Individual preparers, however, may obtain rights over case annotations, indices, and various notes concerning sections and reference tables they have written.
The Commission is composed of ten members, chosen by statute[4] from the following: 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.
[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.
The pocket parts were originally issued biennially, and then annually once the General Assembly began meeting every year in 1970.
Changes are added through regular supplements and replacement volumes, rather than the issuance of a completely new code, which has only occurred five times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also included annotations, in the form of footnotes that traced the development of institutions and legal doctrines back to the 17th century.
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."
Four years later, Pollard published the Supplement to the Code of Virginia, which only printed amended sections and new laws, with new case annotations.
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.
