Pursuant to the state constitution, the California State Legislature and the Governor have enacted the California Statutes, which in turn have been codified into the 29 California Codes. The first four codes, enacted in 1872, were the Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Penal Code, and the Political Code (which much later would become the Elections Code). However, these did not constitute a complete codification, and statutes on subject matter inappropriate for the four codes were simply not codified. In 1929, the Legislature finally established the California Code Commission as a permanent government agency (it had previously existed only intermittently on an ad hoc temporary basis), and it spent the next thirty years slowly codifying the rest of the California Statutes. Upon completing this task in 1953, the Code Commission was replaced by the California Law Revision Commission.
Although there is a Code of Civil Procedure, there was never a Code of Criminal Procedure; California’s law of criminal procedure is codified in Part 2 of the Penal Code. The newest code is the Family Code, which was split off from the Civil Code in 1994.
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