code-topic-walk

Code of Virginia, by topic

The publisher runs no full-text search operation. Its own search backend was down when this was checked, and its JSON API has no search at all. So a reader who says "what does Virginia law say about short-term rentals" cannot be answered by searching, and the two ways to fail here are equally bad: guessing a citation that sounds right, or answering the legal question from memory and dressing it in a section number afterwards.

What is available is the Code's own structure: titles, a title's chapters, a chapter's sections. That is a hierarchy a reader can be walked down, and each level's rows carry the arguments for the level below. This walk is that descent, and it states where the descent stopped.

1. Establish the frame

• A title is a subject area, and the mapping from a question to a title is the hard step. Local government is Title 15.2. Motor vehicles is 46.2. Crimes is 18.2. That mapping is knowledge about the Code's organisation, not about the law, and it is the one place this walk reasons rather than reads.
• A citation is title-section, and the section number carries the chapter: 15.2-2200 is in Title 15.2, chapter 22. Reading that structure off a citation is how a caller who has one skips straight to the text.
• Sections are repealed, renumbered, and added. A citation that is not found is a fact about the Code as published today, not an error, and the publisher redirects rather than returning a not-found status.
• The published text is the text. It is not the annotations, the case law, or the regulations promulgated under it, and none of those are here.

2. Minimum data walk

Step 1 — name candidate titles. From the subject, propose the titles that plausibly hold it, and say why each. Two or three, not one: a subject often sits in more than one, and land use touches both local-government authority and the enabling statutes for specific tools.

Step 2 — read the title list and check the names. Walk the contents from the top and read the titles as published. This is the step that catches a title that was renumbered or one that never existed under the name assumed. A title the Code does not have and a title with no chapters come back the same way, so say which question was asked.