Opinion ID: 3168933
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: History of Special Laws Prohibition

Text: The Missouri Constitution prohibits the legislature from passing “any local or special law … where a general law can be made applicable, and whether a general law could have been made applicable is a judicial question to be judicially determined without regard to any legislative assertion on that subject.” MO. CONST. art. III, § 40. A comparable constitutional ban on special or local legislation has been a part of the Missouri Constitution since the first such ban was adopted by Missouri voters in 1875. Jefferson Cnty., 205 S.W.3d at 870. Although recent cases use the terms “local law” and “special law” almost interchangeably, historically these terms referred to different but related types of nongeneral laws. “Local law” traditionally was the term used to describe a law “which relates or operates over a particular locality instead of over the whole territory of the state.” BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 939 (6th ed. 1990). By contrast, a “special law” referred to a law “relating to particular persons or things; one made for individual cases or for particular places or districts; one operating upon a selected class, rather than upon the public generally.” Id. at 1397–98. A special law was also sometimes called a 5 “private law,” that is, a law relating to a particular individual, association or corporation, rather than a particular locale. Id. at 1398, 1196. Black’s second definition for local laws is for all practical purposes, however, the same as that for special laws, for both definitions state that they refer to laws that relate to “certain persons or things of a class … instead of all of the class.” Id. at 939, 1397. It may not be not surprising, therefore, that, over time, the two terms came to be used interchangeably, so that the framers of Missouri’s 1875 and 1945 Constitutions chose to limit local and special laws together in the same section of the Missouri Constitution (“No local or special law may be adopted …”) when drafting what is now article III, section 40. 3 Many cases, including this Court’s most recent two opinions addressing article III, section 40, have effectively merged the terms, referring to both local and special laws simply as “special laws.” See, e.g., Jefferson Cnty., 205 S.W.3d at 870 and City of St. Louis, 382 S.W.3d at 914. For consistency, in this opinion this Court also will refer to this law as a “special” law although it has aspects of what historically would have been considered a local law as well.