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Jake Shatzer

Publication Date

12-19-2025

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In 1858, Georgia’s General Assembly commissioned the state’s first official code. The legislature appointed three men to assemble a lengthy volume that included all the legislative acts that were in force at the time. Besides statutes, the General Assembly also tasked the codifiers with codifying legal principles of the English common law, Georgia Supreme Court decisions, and English statutes that were still in force. As a result, the codifiers inserted hundreds of provisions into the code that they wrote in an attempt to distill these legal principles into statutory form. When the codifiers’ work was done, the General Assembly adopted the code and gave its provisions the force of law, regardless of whether those provisions had previously been enacted by the General Assembly or written for the first time by the codifiers.

This same basic process was followed until the modern code was adopted. From 1863 until 1933, new codes incorporated both new legislative acts and statutes written by codifiers rather than the General Assembly. This might not seem problematic at first blush. Though codifier-drafted statutes might have gotten less individual consideration from the legislature, the General Assembly still ultimately passed a bill enacting those provisions into law. But there could be a serious defect with this process. Georgia’s constitution contains a “single subject matter” rule, which requires that laws adopted by the General Assembly relate to only a single subject. The codes, of course, touched on a wide variety of unrelated topics from crimes to contracts, the organization of the government, taxes, and more. Arguably, then, the adoption of codifier-drafted statutes in the code violated the constitution.

Such a theory might seem far-fetched, but a dissenting opinion from the Georgia Supreme Court has seemingly endorsed the logic behind this idea. But why should anyone care about laws that may or may not have been constitutionally enacted so long ago? The answer lies in the fact that, each time a code was adopted, the new code retained many statutes written by the earlier codifiers. As a result, many statutes in Georgia’s code today are the same ones written by the original codifiers. And those statutes were only ever adopted in a single code-adoption bill. If every code adoption was unconstitutional, the hundreds of codifier-drafted statutes still in force today would all be invalid.

The ramifications of that result could be far-reaching. But this Article argues that the effect of the state’s early codification practices is not so dramatic. Applying the Georgia Supreme Court’s single-subject jurisprudence would actually validate the acts that adopted the codes. This is because the code adoption acts did have a single objective: adopting a comprehensive code of laws. With a possible invalidation of these statutes off the table, this Article argues that the unique history of codifier- drafted statutes should still play a role in how courts interpret those that remain in the code today.

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