§ 8.01-389.Judicial records as evidence; full faith and credit; recitals in deeds, deeds of trust, and mortgages; "records" defined; certification.

Court records only matter if the next court trusts them, and Section 8.01-389 builds that trust into the evidence rules. Any record of a judicial proceeding, or other official record, from a Virginia court counts as prima facie evidence once the clerk who keeps it certifies it as a true record — no separate authentication battle required. The same treatment extends to certified records from the courts of another state, another country, or the United States. And when a judicial proceeding involves review of a petition for a temporary detention order, that counts as a judicial proceeding for purposes of this section too.

Virginia courts owe those out-of-state records real deference: full faith and credit, matching whatever weight the record carries back where it came from. There is one guardrail. If a court outside Virginia entered an injunction limiting or blocking someone’s access to Virginia’s courts without giving that person notice and a chance to be heard first, a Virginia court does not have to honor that foreign order — and may, at its discretion, hold its own hearing to check whether the notice and opportunity for hearing back in the other court were adequate.

Beyond judicial records, the section reaches into property law: recitals of fact in a recorded deed or deed of trust conveying an interest in real property count as prima facie evidence of that fact. And it defines “records,” for purposes of this article, expansively — any memorandum, report, paper, data compilation, or other record in any form, or any combination of those.

Certification gets its own shortcut. Language like “copy teste,” “true copy,” “certified copy,” or something substantially similar, affixed to a copy that carries a clerk’s or deputy clerk’s signature and names the court where the original is kept, counts as prima facie proof that the clerk certified the copy as true — no official seal is required, and clerks remain free to use other acceptable certification methods. That certification does double duty: it also automatically authenticates the record for admission into evidence in any trial, hearing, or proceeding.