All words shall be actionable which from their usual construction and common acceptance are construed as insults and tend to violence and breach of the peace.
Va. Code Ann. § 8.01-45
Action for insulting words
Applied in 32 court decisions — leading case 977 F. Supp. 404 - Telco Communications v. an Apple a Day (1997)
Most recently applied in Steele v. Goodman (March 2019)
Code 1950, § 8-630; 1977, c. 617.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Virginia Law Portal (LIS). Reproduced from public-domain Virginia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.