California Codes - Interpretation

Interpretation

The Codes contain, or are supposed to only contain general statutory law, with the emphasis on the word "general". The Legislature also regularly enacts a variety of other things that are not laws of general application, such as annual budget bills and resolutions honoring the accomplishments of various distinguished persons; because of their limited application, all those things do not go into the Codes.

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.

There are also a handful of relatively minor statutes which were never codified and are not included in the Legislative Counsel's online copy, but probably should have been codified as they are laws of general application. The unofficial annotated codes include those statutes either as appendixes to the codes in which they probably should have been codified, or within annotations to particular code sections.