7 www.loubar.org December 2024 Serving your practice as our own For more information call us at 502-568-6100 or Submit for a quick quote at www.LMICK.com KNOW… Know the military and veteran population in your local community. Utilize the wealth of knowledge and resources provided by veteran service organizations (VSOs) like the Disabled Veterans of America (DAV), American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and many more. ASK… Ask new clients: Are you a veteran? UNDERSTAND… Understand the steps you can take when a veteran (client) exhibits symptoms of self-harm. LEND… Lend a helping hand to those disabled veterans or financially strapped veterans whom you can assist either pro bono or at reduced rates. ASKS ALL ATTORNEYS PRACTICING IN KENTUCKY TO: THE MILITARY AND VETERANS LAW COMMITTEE Send an email to [email protected] QUESTIONS FOR THE MILITARY AND VETERANS LAW COMMITTEE? RESOURCES KY Department of Veterans Affairs Volunteers of America Lawyers Serving Warriors General Assembly website, https://legislature.ky.gov. To start, you will need to determine the year when the amendment was proposed. The history note in the Kentucky Revised Statutes will have this. Go to the legislative website and choose the Bills tab. This is the landing page for the Legisla- tive Record; choose the year and session where the amendment was proposed. The Legislative Record page has many headers, but I’d direct you to the Bill and Amendment Index Headings under Miscellaneous in the last column. The heading, “Constitution, Ky.,” will have all the amendments. For example, if you are researching this year’s Amendment 2, you will be directed to the bill sum- mary page for House Bill 2, with the title, all versions of the bill, sponsors and a useful Legislative History table, which will include when it was sent to committee, the dates when it was heard in committee, committee substitutes, votes, etc. Those committee dates are important because if your amendment was proposed after 2010 you can see video coverage of committee and floor debates on the KET website at https://ket.org/legislature. At the KET Legislature page, choose Archived Legislative Coverage, use the drop-down menu to find 2024 regular session, and scroll back in time to the March 14, 2024 hearing of the Elections, Constitutional Amendments & Intergovernmental Affairs Committee to hear discussion of the text that would become Amendment 2. After an amendment passes out of the legislature, it is placed on the ballot and faces the verdict of the voters. The Secretary of State’s office is the custodian of the official election results and has records on the voting on all constitutional amendments, broken down by county, going back to 1955 at http://elect.ky.gov under the results tab. Older Amendments Amendments in the pre-internet era can be researched using the hardbound Kentucky Acts and the House and Senate Journals available at the University of Louisville Law Library. Books?! Ugh! Detailed instructions on this process can be found in the constitution and legislative his- tory chapters of my Kentucky Legal Research Manual, 4th (Lexington KY: UK/CLE, 2016). Another excellent resource is Robert M. Ireland’s Kentucky State Constitution: A Reference Guide (1999) which has a “section-by-section analysis of the current constitution of the State of Kentucky” that should provide some context and history for any part of the state constitution in effect at the end of last century. And, if you are already at the library, ask a librarian for assistance! Kurt X. Metzmeier is the interim director of the law library and professor of legal bibliography at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. He is the author of Writing the Legal Record: Law Reporters in Nineteenth-Century Ken- tucky, a group biography of Kentucky’s earliest law reporters, who were leading members of antebellum Kentucky’s legal and political worlds. n (continued from previous page)