Last December, the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld a law by a slim 4-3 majority that limited the power of the Jefferson County Board of Education and delegated more authority to the district’s superintendent.
Almost exactly one year later, the state’s high court has just done the opposite.
In a 4-3 ruling Thursday, the justices struck down the 2022 law, saying it violated the constitution by targeting one specific school district.
The court’s new opinion on the law is because of its change in membership since last December, as newly elected Justice Pamela Goodwine was sworn in a month later, and then joined three other justices in granting the school board’s request to rehear the case in April.
Replacing a chief justice who had voted to uphold the law last year, Goodwine sided with the majority in the opinion written by Justice Angela McCormick Bisig on Thursday to strike it down.
Bisig wrote that treating the Jefferson County district differently from all other public school districts in the state violated Sections 59 and 60 of the Kentucky Constitution. She noted that while the court “should and does give great deference to the propriety of duly enacted statutes,” they are also “duty bound to ensure that legislative decisions stay within the important mandates” of the constitution.
“When, as here, that legislative aim is focused on one and only one county without any articulable reasonable basis, the enactment violates Sections 59 and 60 of our Constitution,” Bisig wrote. “Reformulating the balance of power between one county’s school board and superintendent to the exclusion of all others without any reasonable basis fails the very tests established in our constitutional jurisprudence to discern constitutional infirmity.”
The at-times blistering dissenting opinion of Justice Shea Nickell — who wrote the majority opinion last year — argued the petition for a rehearing was improvidently granted in April, as it “failed to satisfy our Court’s historic legal standard for granting such requests, and nothing changed other than the Court’s composition.”
Nickell wrote that the court disregarded procedural rules and standards, “thereby reasonably damaging perceptions of judicial independence and diminishing public trust in the court system’s fair and impartial administration of justice.”
“I am profoundly disturbed by the damage and mischief such a brazen manipulation of the rehearing standard will inflict on the stability and integrity of our judicial decision-making process in the future.”
He added that some may excuse the majority’s decision by saying that “elections have consequences,” but that unlike legislators and executive officers being accountable to voters, “judges and justices are ultimately accountable to the law.”
“Courts must be free of political machinations and any fortuitous change in the composition of an appellate court’s justices should have no impact upon previously rendered fair and impartial judicial pronouncements,” Nickell wrote.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, whose office defended the law before the court, criticized the new ruling voiding the law.
“I am stunned that our Supreme Court reversed itself based only on a new justice joining the Court,” Coleman said. “This decision is devastating for JCPS students and leaves them trapped in a failing system while sabotaging the General Assembly’s rescue mission.”
Corrie Shull, chair of the Jefferson County Board of Education, said in a statement he is grateful for the court’s new ruling affirming “that JCPS voters and taxpayers should have the same voice in their local operations that other Kentuckians do, through their elected school board members.”
Spokespersons for the Republican majority leadership of the Kentucky House and Senate did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s ruling.
Republican House Speaker David Osborne criticized the move to rehear the case in April, calling it “troubling.”
“Unfortunately, judicial outcomes seem increasingly driven by partisan politics,” Osborne stated. “Kentuckians would be better served to keep politics out of the court, and the court out of politics."
In August, GOP state Rep. Jason Nemes of Middletown penned an op-ed warning that any ruling overturning the 2022 law could draw a lawsuit challenging the Louisville-Jefferson County merger of 2003 as a violation of the same sections of Kentucky Constitution. That same day, Louisville real estate developer and major GOP donor David Nicklies filed a lawsuit seeking just that.
Some Republicans have also criticized Goodwine for not recusing herself from the case, alleging she had a conflict of interest due to an independent political action committee heavily funded by the teachers’ union in Louisville spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads to help elect her last year.
Louisville attorney and GOP official Jack Richardson filed a petition with the clerk of the Kentucky House in October to impeach Goodwine for not recusing herself. Goodwine said through a spokesperson at the time that it would not be appropriate for her to comment about the impeachment petition.
