House Bill 3 would have set up randomly selected panels of three judges.
That panel would hear cases involving state government or the Kentucky constitution.
Instead, the revised version requires those legal challenges must be filed in the home county of the plaintiff not the defendant. If the plaintiff is not a resident of Kentucky then the case would be filed in Franklin Circuit Court.
The revised bill has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The changes come after Kentucky Supreme Court Justice John Minton expressed he was strongly against the original version of the bill last week. He nicknamed the bill the “Rube Goldberg bill” and said it “needs to die.”
GOP bills to strip power from Beshear advance, though chief justice slows courts bill Joe Sonka, Louisville Courier Journal
FRANKFORT The Republican supermajority of the Kentucky General Assembly on Friday sped through more bills aimed at shifting power away from Gov. Andy Beshear.
That includes the Senate s top priority bill, which could be one of several given final passage and sent to the governor s desk Saturday just five days into the 2021 session.
Senate Bill 1, which would limit a governor s powers under a declared emergency such as Beshear s many COVID-19 orders to 30 days unless authorized by the legislature, was amended Thursday to go even further, requiring the governor to receive the permission of the attorney general to suspend any statute during an emergency.
Credit Josh James / WUKY
GOP leaders have long sought to sidestep Franklin Circuit Court, which hears lawsuits against state agencies and officials, arguing judges in the district wield too much influence over cases of affecting the entire commonwealth.
This year, the party is back with a priority House bill that would put civil cases before panels comprised of three judges hailing from three newly-created judicial districts. The districts would cover the entire state and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Minton would select the judges. This isn t the way that I would build it, Sen. Whitney Westerfield said. But I do support moving things out of Franklin Circuit Court, so that frankly those two men, or women one day, can get around to hearing just the cases for people in the Franklin Circuit and these other cases of statewide import can be heard by lots of diffierent judges.
Home » Poker News » Kentucky Supreme Court Rules Against PokerStars for $1.3B
More than a decade of court battles led to this decision. The Kentucky judicial system has been battling with PokerStars since 2008, though the acts in question happened even before then.
PokerStars won a big judgement in 2018 in the Kentucky Court of Appeals – almost exactly two years ago to the date – and hoped that was the end of the case. But the state appealed the case to its Supreme Court, and those justices handed down a ruling late last week that stunned PokerStars, not to mention its new parent company, Flutter Entertainment.