Trial Courts as Constitutional First Responders: A Historical Case Study of the Role of the Franklin County Circuit Court in Kentucky’s Biggest Legal-Political Controversies

Abstract

Although courts of general jurisdiction like Kentucky’s Franklin Circuit Court are discussed by political scientists and legal commentators as purely trial courts, they are by necessity the court of first resort for issues with political import. When branches of government clash, courts of general jurisdiction must decide whether the judiciary has the right to intervene and if so how. This makes these courts crucial actors in the first scene in the drama of legal-political conflicts between branches of government or over the legality of statutes, at least until the appellate courts arrive in the last act. Their rulings are “table-setters” of debate over the issue litigated. These dramas typically play out, in Kentucky and other states, in the court of general jurisdiction that sits in the seat of the state government. This paper will explore these conflicts against the backdrop of the landscape of similar capitol-city courts. While this is not just a Kentucky issue, it is impossible to study it properly outside of the concrete details of an individual state. The paper frames the role of general-jurisdiction leading trial courts in state jurisprudence with a case-study of the modern history of the Franklin Circuit Court and then test the themes raised with an analysis of the interplay between that court and the Kentucky Supreme Court in four major cases in Kentucky’s recent history.