Slave codes left a great deal unsaid, with much of the actual practice of slavery being a matter of traditions rather than formal law.
[3] In addition to these national and state- or colony-level slave codes, there were city ordinances and other local restrictions regarding enslaved people.
Modifications of the Barbadian slave codes were put in place in the Colony of Jamaica in 1664, and were then greatly modified in 1684.
[15] Virginia's slave codes were made in parallel to those in Barbados, with individual laws starting in 1667 and a comprehensive slave-code passed in 1705.
[16] In 1667, the Virginia House of Burgesses enacted a law which did not recognize the conversion of African Americans to Christianity despite a baptism.
In 1680, Virginia passed Act X, which prohibited slaves from carrying weapons, leaving their owner's plantation without a certificate, or raising a hand against "Christians".
Las Siete Partidas was compiled in the thirteenth century, long before the colonization of the new world, and its treatment of slavery was based on the Roman tradition.
Frank Tannenbaum, an influential sociologist who wrote on the treatment of slaves in the Americas, treated the laws in Las Siete Partidas as an accurate reflection of treatment, but later scholarship has moved away from this viewpoint, arguing that the official laws in Las Siete Partidas did not reflect practices in the colonies.
[27] An attempt to unify the Spanish slave codes, the Codigo Negro, was cancelled without ever going into effect because it was unpopular with the slave-owners in the Americas.