Constitution of Kentucky

The first constitutional convention of Kentucky was called by Colonel Benjamin Logan on December 27, 1784, in Danville, the seat of Lincoln County, Virginia.

The document contained a bill of rights, and called for an electoral college to elect senators and the state's governor.

It retained the pro-slavery provisions of the original constitution untouched, but went a step further by disenfranchising free blacks, mixed-race persons and Indians.

This was addressed in the 1850 Constitution by making all state officials, even judges, popularly elected and imposing term limits on these offices.

Among the new provisions were a requirement that slaves and their offspring remain in the state, and that ministers of religion – thought to be largely anti-slavery – were prohibited from holding the office of governor or seats in the General Assembly.

Sessions of the General Assembly were limited to sixty days biennially, requiring a two-thirds majority to extend them.

To prevent the debt from climbing too high in the future, the 1850 Constitution mandated a maximum of $500,000 of indebtedness for the state.

While the relevance of this prohibition may be disputed now, it could potentially have derailed Governor William Goebel's eligibility for public office in the 1890s.

The 1891 Convention did, for the first time, provide a means of amending itself that has been used by the General Assembly to keep a century-old document somewhat current.

The 1962 Kentucky Supreme Court case Matthews v. Allen addressed this problem by opining that the only way to keep circuit judge's salaries adequate, as required by Section 133 of the constitution, was to allow the General Assembly to adjust the $12,000 figure in Section 246 to account for the value of a dollar in 1949.

See also Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky In 1996, Sections 180 and 187 of Kentucky's Constitution were amended to remove language that allowed local governments to levy a poll tax on each person residing within the county or the city, and to remove language requiring that separate schools for "white" and "colored" children be maintained.

A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.

[8] This provision became void in 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.