Definition
Revised Statutes are a formally compiled and reenacted body of statutory law in which existing statutes have been collected, reorganized, and reissued as a unified whole by legislative authority. The term designates an official publication — typically carrying the force of enacted law — in which a jurisdiction's statutes have been systematically arranged, often by subject matter, and passed again as a consolidated legislative act.
The designation matters: a collection of Revised Statutes is not merely a reprint or annotation of prior laws. It represents a deliberate legislative act of reenactment, meaning the compiled text itself is authoritative, not simply evidence of prior enactments. This distinguishes Revised Statutes from compilations or codes that are editorial arrangements without independent reenactment.
The term appears as the official title of statutory collections for many U.S. states and, most prominently, for the federal government. The Revised Statutes of the United States (1873, with a second edition in 1878) were the first codification of federal statutory law, consolidating public laws through 1873 into a single reenacted volume. It remained the primary reference for federal general law until largely superseded by the United States Code beginning in 1926.
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Common Confusion
Revised Statutes, Compiled Laws, Codes, and Session Laws are frequently treated as interchangeable in casual reference. They are not.
Session Laws are statutes as originally passed, published in chronological order by legislative session. They are the primary source.
Compiled Laws or Consolidated Statutes are editorial arrangements of session laws organized for convenience — typically without independent reenactment. They are useful research tools but derive their authority from the underlying session laws, not from the compilation itself.
Revised Statutes are reenacted — the legislature passed the compiled text as law. In jurisdictions where Revised Statutes have been formally enacted, the compiled text controls over prior session laws in cases of conflict.
A Code may refer to either a reenacted compilation (like the U.S. Code's positive law titles) or a non-reenacted editorial arrangement (like the U.S. Code's non-positive law titles). Researchers must check whether a given Code title has been enacted into positive law. The same caution applies to any jurisdiction's statutory compilation claiming the Revised Statutes label.
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Why It Matters in Research
**Citation traps in historical sources.** Nineteenth and early twentieth century legal materials — cases, treatises, briefs — cite frequently to "Rev. Stat. § ___" or "R.S. § ___" without specifying the jurisdiction or edition. The federal Revised Statutes and the Revised Statutes of individual states used overlapping section numbering, and multiple editions exist for many jurisdictions. Always confirm: (1) which jurisdiction's Revised Statutes are cited, (2) which edition or year, and (3) whether subsequent legislation superseded that section before the date relevant to your research.
**Reenactment status and positive law.** When a statute is later incorporated into a Code, the question of whether the Code title was itself reenacted into positive law becomes critical for resolving textual conflicts. For the federal U.S. Code, only certain titles have been enacted as positive law; the remainder are prima facie evidence of the underlying Revised Statutes or session laws. Researchers working with early federal statutes must often trace authority back to the 1873 Revised Statutes or the session laws predating them.
**Supersession and gap periods.** The Revised Statutes of the United States (1873) consolidated laws through a specific cutoff date. Statutes passed after that date — and before the U.S. Code's establishment — exist only in session laws (the Statutes at Large). Research in the period roughly 1873–1926 requires parallel consultation of the Revised Statutes and the Statutes at Large.
**State-level variation.** Some states have maintained the Revised Statutes label continuously (e.g., Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada). Others have transitioned to a Code structure. The legal weight of the label varies: in some states, Revised Statutes have been formally reenacted; in others, the term is used loosely for what is functionally a compiled code. Check each state's statutory authority for the operative statement on whether the compilation is positive law.
**Corpus connections.** Research touching nineteenth-century federal practice, Reconstruction-era legislation, or early administrative law will encounter Revised Statutes citations as the primary statutory reference point. Understanding the structure of the 1873 codification — its organization by title and section, its cutoff date, and its relationship to the Statutes at Large — is foundational for navigating that period's legal materials.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines Revised Statutes as "a body of statutes which have been revised; collected; arranged in order, and re-enacted as a whole," identifying this as the legal title of the compiled laws of several states and of the United States, with standard abbreviations of "Rev. Stat.," "Rev. St.," or "R.S."
Black's definition captures the essential character accurately: the combination of collection, arrangement, and reenactment is what gives Revised Statutes their distinctive legal status. The definition is terse but precise. What it does not address — and what historical dictionaries generally omit — is the practical authority question: where a subsequent Code exists, researchers must determine whether the Code has superseded the Revised Statutes, incorporated them by reference, or left particular sections operative in their original form. Historical dictionaries also do not address the distinction between reenacted and non-reenacted compilations, a distinction that became more operationally significant as codification practice evolved through the twentieth century.
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Jurisdictional Note
The term is used by numerous states as the official title of their statutory compilation, but the legal weight differs. Louisiana's Revised Statutes, for example, are formally reenacted positive law; other states use the title for what is functionally an editorial compilation. Federal researchers working before 1926 should default to the Revised Statutes of the United States (1873) as the primary statutory reference, supplemented by the Statutes at Large for post-1873 enactments.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia: Statutes of Repose vs. Statutes of Limitation (civpro_133) — relevant for research involving the operative text of limitation and repose provisions as they appeared in Revised Statutes versus subsequent codifications.
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