Abstract
Part I discusses the historical background and enactment of the amendment. Next, Part II outlines the legal challenges available during the political constitutional amendment process, detailing what challenges were – or were not – made to the right-to-farm amendment during its enactment. Part III discusses how Missouri courts generally review legislatively-referred constitutional amendments and how they would likely review challenges brought under the right-to-farm amendment. Part IV discusses the adequacy of existing legal challenges to Missouri constitutional amendments – particularly on the front end – when these amendments are enacted via a single election. It also provides suggestions for the needed reform of this process. Even if the right-to-farm amendment just reaffirms rights already available to Missouri citizens, it was an expensive experiment on the state’s bill of rights. Ultimately, however, it seems to do more than that by foreclosing future legislative regulation of agriculture and possibly overturning existing statutory measures. While this Comment is not an indictment of farmers’ rights, it questions whether the existing constitutional amendment process, exemplified in the passage of the right-to-farm amendment, adequately corresponds to the foundational nature of the Missouri Constitution.
Recommended Citation
Angela Kennedy,
Sustainable Constitutional Growth? The “Right to Farm” and Missouri’s Review of Constitutional Amendments,
81 Mo. L. Rev.
(2016)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol81/iss1/20