Ca Legal Codes
As mentioned earlier, the first four codes were not completely complete. As a result, California law became disorganized as laws not codified in California laws continued to accumulate. After many years of intermittent code commissions, the California Code Commission was finally established in 1929 as a permanent government agency. In its first report, the commission noted, “California law is in a deplorable state. Law writers and publishers are joining forces by considering it the worst legal law in the country. [12] To fulfill the new permanent incarnation of the Code Commission, the state legislature simply appointed the Legislative Counsel as Secretary of the Commission. [8] For practical reasons, most of the actual work was done by the Deputy Legislative Counsel and then approved by the Code Commissioners. [13] Use this advanced search tool to search laws and codes directly. California codes have had influence in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions, particularly Puerto Rico. For example, on March 1, 1901, Puerto Rico issued a Code of Criminal Procedure and a Code of Criminal Procedure inspired by the California Penal Code,[1][2] and on March 10, 1904, a Code of Civil Procedure based on the California Code of Civil Procedure.
[3] Therefore, the California jurisdiction that interpreted these codes was treated as a persuasive authority in Puerto Rico. [4] The four original California codes were not designed from scratch, but were largely adapted by the Code Commission from codes prepared for New York State by the great law reformer David Dudley Field II. [10] [11] As a result of the gold rush, many New York lawyers had emigrated to California, including Field`s brother, Stephen Johnson Field, who would eventually serve as California`s fifth chief justice before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. New York`s strong influence on early California law began with the California Practice Act of 1851 (drafted with the help of Stephen Field), which was based directly on the New York Code of Civil Procedure of 1850 (the Field Code). In turn, it was the California Practice Act that served as the basis for the California Code of Civil Procedure. New York never promulgated the civil or political law books proposed by Field and belatedly adopted its proposed codes of criminal and penal procedure only after California, but they formed the basis of the codes promulgated by California in 1872. [11] FindLaw codes may not reflect the latest version of the law in your jurisdiction. Please check the status of the code you are looking for with the state legislature or Westlaw before relying on it for your legal needs.
As mentioned earlier, the Legislative Counsel maintains an online website containing the official text of the codes. [10] The four original codes were printed in 1872 as separate state documents (but not under California law) and were also published by commercial publishers in various versions, including as a set in 1872. [10] Instead of an official sentence, unofficial annotated codes are widely used by private publishers. [10] West publishes West`s Annotated California Codes and LexisNexis publishes Deering`s California Codes Annotated. [10] Although Deering`s is much older,[10] West is the more popular of the two annotated codes. Libraries that do not have enough shelf space to carry both codes – usually because they are small law libraries, public libraries for the general public (as opposed to public law libraries) or non-governmental libraries – usually wear only West and omit Deering. The commission spent the next 24 years analyzing the huge body of laws not codified in California`s regulations and drafting almost every other code. In 1953, when the Code Commission carried out its assigned task and published its final report on 1 September of the same year, 25 codes existed at the time. [10] That year, the Legislature replaced the Code Commission with the California Law Review Commission. [8] [10] Since then, the CLRC has been tasked with regularly reviewing the codes and proposing various legislative amendments.
[10] Most are simple maintenance changes to ensure that legal references are properly updated to add new laws or omit laws that no longer exist. Codes are an important part of California law. However, they must be read in conjunction with federal and state constitutions, federal and state jurisprudence, and the California Regulatory Code to understand how they are actually interpreted and applied in court. The Civil Code is particularly difficult to understand because the California Supreme Court has treated parts of the Code as a mere reformulation of the common law. For example, the Supreme Court in Li v. Yellow Cab Co. the original intention of the legislature to adopt article 1714 of the Civil Code[14] to codify a system of contributory negligence subject to the doctrine of the clear last chance, then decided that the legislature had not intended to freeze the applicable common law and then introduced legally binding comparative negligence. On the other hand, other codes, such as the Succession Code and the Evidence Code, would have completely supplanted the common law, which means that cases interpreting their provisions always try to give effect to the will of Parliament to the extent possible. In 1868, the California Legislature authorized the first of many ad hoc code commissions to begin the process of codifying California law. Each code commission was a one- or two-year temporary employment agency that was either closed at the end of the approved period or re-approved and transferred to the next period; therefore, in a few years, there has been no code commission. [8] The first four codes of law published in 1872 were the Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Penal Code and the Political Code.
[9] [10] Laws that did not fall into these categories were simply not codified in California laws. The California Codes are 29 jurisdictions enacted by the California State Legislature, which together constitute the general legal law of California. The official codes are maintained by the California Office of Legislative Counsel for the legislature. The Legislative Counsel also publishes the official text of the Codes on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov. There are also a handful of relatively small statutes that have never been codified and are not included in the Legislative Counsel`s online copy, but probably should have been codified since they are laws of general application. [10] For example, some own-initiative laws could not be codified by a law of the legislature because they had originally been passed by voters` referendums. [10] The final report of the Code Commission of September 1, 1953 recommended that these laws be published in an appendix to the code that most concern them and not be summarized in a separate volume. [10] Unofficial annotated codes contain these acts either as annexes to the codes in which they probably should have been codified, or in notes to certain sections of the code; Deering`s also prints uncodified acts of initiative in a separate volume. [10] The Guam Code, introduced by Governor George A.
in 1933.