The California Codes are 29 legal codes enacted by the California State Legislature, which together form the general statutory law of the state of California. Due to tradition and inertia, they have never been consolidated into a single unified code, unlike the United States Code or codifications in other U.S. states.
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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-year temporary agency which either closed at the end of the year or was reauthorized and rolled over into the next year; thus, in some years there was no Code Commission. The first four codes enacted in 1872 were the Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Penal Code, and the Political Code (which later became the Elections Code). Statutes that did not fit these categories were simply left uncodified in the California Statutes.
After many years of on-and-off Code Commissions, the California Code Commission was finally established as a permanent government agency in 1929, and it spent the next 24 years analyzing the massive body of uncodified law in the California Statutes and drafting almost all the other codes. By 1953, when the Code Commission completed its assigned task, 25 Codes were then in existence. The Legislature replaced the Code Commission with the California Law Revision Commission, which periodically reviews the Codes and proposes various amendments to the Legislature. Most of these are simple maintenance amendments to ensure that statutory cross-references are properly updated to add new laws or omit laws which no longer exist.
The newest code is the Family Code, which was split off from the Civil Code in 1994. Oddly, although there is a Code of Civil Procedure, there is no Code of Criminal Procedure.[1] Instead, criminal procedure in California is codified in Part 2 of the Penal Code, while Part 1 is devoted to substantive criminal law.
The Codes form an important part of California law. However, they must be read in combination with the federal and state constitutions, federal and state case law, and the California Code of Regulations, in order to understand how they are actually interpreted and enforced in court. The Civil Code is particularly difficult to understand since the Supreme Court of California has treated parts of it like a mere restatement of the common law. In contrast, other codes, such as the Probate Code and the Evidence Code, are considered to have fully displaced the common law, meaning that cases interpreting their provisions always try to give effect whenever possible to the Legislature's intent.
Currently, the state government does not publish an official hardcopy version of the codes, though unofficial annotated copies are widely available from private publishers. West publishes West's Annotated California Codes and LexisNexis publishes Deering's California Codes Annotated. The West annotated version is the more popular one; it is available throughout California at most large public libraries, and is also available throughout the U.S. at virtually all large law libraries.
The state Legislative Counsel maintains an online copy of the codes (see link below), but the online copy lacks the detailed annotations which are often essential to understanding the text of the codes.
The 29 California Codes are as follows:
The California Codes were highly influential in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions, especially Puerto Rico. For example, on March 1, 1901, Puerto Rico enacted a Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure which were modeled after the California Penal Code,[1][2] and on March 10, 1904, it enacted a Code of Civil Procedure modeled after the California Code of Civil Procedure.[3] Thus, California case law interpreting those codes was treated as persuasive authority in Puerto Rico.[4]
In 1941, the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly joined the nationwide movement towards transferring civil procedure and evidentiary law into a system of rules promulgated by the courts, then abolished the judicial power to promulgate rules in 1946, then reinstated it in 1952 (subject to the right of the legislature to amend court rules before they went into effect).[3] Eventually, after much of its content was superseded by the Rules of Civil Procedure and the Rules of Evidence, most of the Code of Civil Procedure of Puerto Rico was rendered obsolete and was therefore repealed.[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.[5]
The Code of Guam, implemented in 1933 by Governor George A. Alexander, were modeled after the California Codes.[6]