(1) The common law not to be meddled with, except where alterations are necessary. The statutes to be revised and digested, alterations proper for us to be made; the diction where obsolete or redundant, to be reformed; but otherwise to undergo as few changes as possible. The acts of the English Commonwealth to be examined. The statutes to be divided into periods; the acts of Assembly made on the same subject to be incorporated into them. The laws of other colonies to be examined, and any good ones to be adopted.
In the margin is here written:
General rules in drawing provisions &c., which would do only what the law would do without them, to be omitted. Bills to be short; not to include matters of different natures; not to insert an unnecessary word; nor omit a useful one. Laws to be made on the spur of the present occasion, and all innovating laws to be limited in their duration.[61]
Truly an admirable plan! Not the scheme of rash reformers, of a priori-minded legislators, deriving a code of laws from a certain number of abstract principles. It was not their purpose to make a tabula rasa of the old structure which had slowly grown stone by stone, statute by statute and to rebuild entirely on new plans. The old house resting on solid Anglo-Saxon foundations was still substantial and safe and it could serve its purpose if only a few partitions were torn down, a few useless annexes demolished, and better ventilation provided. Nothing was farther from the mind of the committee than to erect in Virginia a Greek or Roman temple of Themis.
The statutes were divided into five parts. Jefferson was to take "the first period in the division of statutes to end with 25th, H. 8th"; Pendleton the second period "to end at the Revolution"; Wythe the third "to come to the present day"; G. Mason the fourth, "to consist of the residuary part of the Virginia laws to which is added the criminal law and land law." The fifth, attributed to Lee, "to be the regulation of property in slaves, and their condition; and also the examination of the laws of the other colonies."[62] Mason soon retired, "being no lawyer", and Lee having died, the work was redistributed which explains the somewhat different allotment indicated by Jefferson in the "Autobiography." On the other hand, he seems to have claimed for himself in the "Autobiography" an honor and an attitude that really belonged to the committee:
I thought it would be useful, also, in new draughts to reform the style of the later British statutes, and of our own arts of Assembly; which, from their verbosity, their endless tautologies, their involution of case within case, and parenthesis within parenthesis, and their multiplied efforts at certainty, by saids and aforesaids, by ors and by ands, to make them more plain, are really rendered more perplexed and incomprehensible, not only to common readers, but to the lawyers themselves.
The notes taken by G. Mason leave no doubt that this was also the attitude of the committee and their definite policy. It was a slow, painstaking, meticulous task, requiring common sense, good judgment, a good sense for words and erudition. To make laws intelligible and clear is no small achievement. But certainly it was not the sort of work that an a priori philosopher, fond of generalizations and universal principles, would have relished, or would have been willing to submit himself to for more than two years. If in some political matters Jefferson differed from Mr. Pendleton, he admired him and later paid him a handsome tribute in the "Autobiography." Pendleton—cool, smooth and persuasive, quick, acute and resourceful—was a remarkable debater.
George Mason, a man of the first order of wisdom, of expansive mind, profound judgment, cogent in argument, learned in the lore of our former constitution, and earnest for the republican change on democratic principles ... his virtue was of the purest tint; his integrity inflexible, and his justice exact; of warm patriotism, and, devoted as he was to liberty, and to the natural and equal rights of man, he might truly be called the Cato of his country without the avarice of the Roman.[63]
When the preliminary work was done, the reviewers met at Williamsburg in February, 1779, and "day by day" they examined critically their several parts, sentence by sentence, scrutinizing and amending, "until they had agreed on the whole." "The Revised Laws", comprehending one hundred and twenty-six bills, were reported to the General Assembly June 18, 1779; bills were taken out occasionally from time to time, and because of Madison's efforts fifty-six out of the one hundred and twenty-six were after amendments made laws at the sessions of 1785, 1786. Among the bills reworded or initiated by Jefferson several stood out conspicuously.
The Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments is a particularly good example of the methods used by Jefferson in rewriting the old legislation. On sending it to George Wythe he wrote: