Definition
"Rev." is a legal abbreviation, not a substantive legal term. It appears in legal texts, citations, and statutory references in two primary senses:
1. Revised / Revised Statutes. "Rev." is standard shorthand for "Revised," most commonly appearing in citations to compiled or codified statutory collections — e.g., "Rev. Stat.," "Rev. Code," or "R.S." This usage signals that the referenced law appears in an official revision or codification of statutes, as distinguished from session laws (acts passed in a single legislative session and published sequentially without consolidation).
2. Reversal / Reversed. In appellate notation and case history abbreviations, "rev." or "rev'd" indicates that a lower court's decision was reversed on appeal. This usage appears in parallel citations, subsequent history notations, and legal research tools to alert the reader that the cited decision was overturned.
Common Confusion
These two meanings are visually identical but function in entirely different research contexts. "Rev. Stat. § 42" points to a statutory code; "rev'd, 310 U.S. 100" points to appellate history. Context — whether the abbreviation follows a section symbol and number or follows a case citation — disambiguates them. Researchers working with older materials should also note that "Rev." alone sometimes appeared as shorthand for "Revenue" in tax and customs statutes, adding a third possible reading in that subject-matter context.
Why It Matters in Research
The "Revised Statutes" sense carries the greatest research complexity. Nineteenth-century American practice produced a proliferation of official statutory revisions at both the federal and state levels, and "Rev. Stat." in an older legal text may refer to any of several distinct compilations depending on jurisdiction and date. The United States Revised Statutes of 1873 (and the 1878 second edition) were the first official codification of federal law; citations to "Rev. Stat. § [number]" in federal cases of that era point to that specific compilation, not to the modern U.S. Code. Researchers tracing a statutory lineage from a nineteenth-century federal case must identify which revision is cited before locating the current Code equivalent.
At the state level, the problem multiplies. Many states issued multiple "revised" compilations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each superseding the last. A citation to "Rev. Stat." in an 1870 Ohio opinion references a different compilation than the same abbreviation in an 1890 Ohio opinion. The Law Mind corpus spans this entire period, and researchers should treat "Rev. Stat." citations in older materials as requiring positive identification of the specific edition before cross-referencing.
The "reversed" sense is more stable but carries its own trap: older reporters and digests used varying abbreviations ("rev.," "rev'd," "reversed," "rev'g") without standardization. A citation marked only "rev." in a pre-twentieth-century digest may be incomplete subsequent history, not authoritative confirmation that the case was overturned — verification against the full reporter is warranted.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law treats "Rev." solely as an abbreviation for Revised Statutes, directing readers to the entry for "RE-" for expanded treatment — a typical nineteenth-century lexicographic approach that collapsed abbreviation entries into the expanded form. This reflects the period's assumption that "Revised Statutes" was the dominant and essentially exclusive legal meaning of the abbreviation.
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not treat "Rev." as a standalone entry. The source material captured here is incidental text from surrounding entries touching on reversal and reversion — concepts etymologically related but lexicographically distinct. Burrill's handling underscores that nineteenth-century legal dictionaries were not systematic abbreviation guides; researchers relying on them for abbreviation resolution will find frequent gaps.
Neither historical source addresses the appellate notation sense, which was standardized largely through twentieth-century citation manuals (most influentially, the Bluebook and its predecessors). Researchers should not expect pre-twentieth-century legal dictionaries to resolve the "reversed" abbreviation question.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Revised Statutes; Statutory Codification; Appellate Review