§ 8.01-689.Short title.

A short-title section like this one does not create rights or duties on its own. It works like a label on a filing cabinet: it tells everyone what to call the drawer, not what is inside it. Here, the drawer is Chapter 27, a set of statutes that reshapes how pro se civil suits filed by prisoners move through Virginia’s courts.

The General Assembly adopted the chapter in 2002, giving Virginia its own version of the restrictions that Congress had already imposed on prisoner suits in federal court. What follows in the rest of the chapter covers who counts as a covered prisoner, how filing fees and in forma pauperis status work, when a court must deny fee-waiver status to a repeat filer, where a prisoner must sue, how the Commonwealth gets served and how long it has to answer, when discovery and oral argument are available, how summary judgment works in these cases, and how the Department of Corrections may share a prisoner’s own records with the lawyers defending a suit against it. The short title lets anyone refer to that whole bundle of rules with one name.