Bilder's work is of exceptional quality, but royal review of colonial statutes worked differently for charter colonies like Rhode Island than for a royal colony like Virginia, which I had occasion to investigate quite recently. 



In 1679 the Crown ordered Virginia's governor to send all bills the assembly had passed to London for review before they could become law. Although the Crown did not renew the instruction in 1682, that was the beginning of much closer royal oversight of the work of the General Assembly comparable in some ways to Poyning’s Law of 1494, which required English approval of acts of the Irish Parliament before they could take effect. Instructions to Virginia’s governors issued in 1707, 1710, 1717, 1720, 1728, 1738, and 1756 required the General Assembly to insert a clause suspending the operations of any new statute affecting the royal prerogative or trade until the king and Privy Council allowed or disallowed it.  Other instructions issued in 1710, 1728, and 1738 included similar requirements for private acts, which usually dealt with peoples’ property.  Leonard Woods Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670–1776, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), 1:125, 140-143, 218-219.



If memory serves me correctly, the Crown disallowed several statutes enacted with the revisal of Virginia's legal code in 1749.



Brent Tarter

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-----Original Message-----

From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jon Kukla

Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2016 9:59 AM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: [VA-HIST] Colonial law codes vs. session laws



Impressed by her scholarship in Madison ' Hand, I just finished Mary Sarah Bilder's earlier book, The Transatlantic Constitution : Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire  (Harvard University Press, 2004). Focus is chiefly on Rhode Island, but her discussion of advantages of compiling legal codes as opposed to publishing session laws in order to evade Privy Council scrutiny of laws "repugnant" to English law (pp. 59ff) struck me as a perspective on contemporary (late-17th-  early-18th century) Virginia practice that might interest some VA-HIST folks.



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