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.