Definition
A Revised Statutes is an official compilation of a jurisdiction's enacted laws that have been collected, reorganized, and re-enacted as a unified body of legislation. Rather than leaving statutory law scattered across individual session laws and legislative acts passed over time, a revised statutes compilation gathers those laws into a single, systematically arranged volume that carries the force of law upon its enactment by the legislature.
The term refers both to the process (revision and re-enactment) and to the resulting publication. Because the compiled text is itself re-enacted, the revised statutes supersede the individual session laws from which they were drawn — the compilation is the law, not merely a finding aid to it.
At the federal level, the United States Revised Statutes of 1873 (commonly cited as Rev. Stat. or R.S.) represented the first such comprehensive federal compilation. Many states produced their own revised statutes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the title persists in some jurisdictions today.
Common Confusion
Revised Statutes should be distinguished from two related but distinct concepts:
A code (such as the United States Code) is an ongoing, topically organized arrangement of statutes, continuously updated and supplemented, but not necessarily re-enacted as a whole. A code may be prima facie evidence of the law, or it may be positive law depending on whether the particular title has been enacted into positive law by Congress.
A session law compilation or statutes at large is a chronological collection of laws as originally passed, without reorganization or re-enactment. It preserves the raw legislative record but imposes no new order and carries no superseding effect.
The critical distinction for researchers: revised statutes derive their authority from the re-enactment itself. When a legislature re-enacts compiled text, subsequent disputes over the original session law's meaning are resolved by the revised statutes text, not the prior acts. This has significant implications for researching pre-revision statutory history.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "Revised Statutes" in a historical source can refer to several different compilations depending on jurisdiction and era, and researchers who treat the term loosely risk citing the wrong body of law or missing significant textual changes introduced during revision.
At the federal level, the 1873 U.S. Revised Statutes were the controlling text for many federal statutory questions until the U.S. Code began replacing them title by title. Some U.S. Code titles have been enacted into positive law; others remain merely a codification of the Revised Statutes and subsequent amendments. Researchers working on pre-1926 federal questions should verify whether the Revised Statutes text, the original session law, or both are relevant.
State-level variation is substantial. Some states titled their compilations "Revised Statutes" and re-enacted them as positive law; others used the same title for what were functionally annotated collections without full re-enactment. The legal weight of the compilation depends on the specific enacting legislation, not the title alone.
Citation forms introduce additional confusion. Black's notes the common abbreviations Rev. Stat., Rev. St., and R.S., but historical law review articles, court opinions, and practice materials are inconsistent. A cite to "R.S. § 42" in an 1890 opinion requires contextual analysis to determine whether it refers to the federal revised statutes, a particular state's compilation, or a prior edition of either.
Researchers tracing statutory lineage — particularly for constitutional challenges, preemption arguments, or historical intent questions — must identify which revision generation is at issue. Many states produced multiple successive revisions, each superseding the last, with intervening session laws sometimes creating gaps or conflicts that the next revision was meant to resolve.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines Revised Statutes as "a body of statutes which have been revised, collected, arranged in order, and re-enacted as a whole," noting that the title was used for compilations in several states and by the United States, with standard abbreviations Rev. Stat., Rev. St., and R.S.
The definition is accurate but minimal. Black's does not address the positive-law distinction — a significant omission for research purposes — nor does it flag the interpretive consequences of re-enactment, namely that the revised text can displace prior session law as the authoritative source. Historical legal dictionaries generally treat Revised Statutes as a bibliographic and citation matter rather than a substantive legal category, which understates the interpretive stakes involved in working with these compilations.
Jurisdictional Note
Usage of the title "Revised Statutes" varies by state and era. Some states (including Missouri, Maine, and New York at various points) used the term for formally re-enacted compilations; others applied it to what were effectively unofficial or only partially authorized arrangements. Federal researchers should distinguish the 1873 U.S. Revised Statutes from the later U.S. Code, noting that not all U.S. Code titles have been enacted into positive law to this day.