How to Find and Cite Kentucky Law

Look up KRS 13A.020 today and Kentucky hands you two laws under one number. One carries the label "(Effective until January 1, 2027)" and the other says "(Effective January 1, 2027)".

Both sit in the chapter listing, one line under the other, same number, different text. A bare cite to KRS 13A.020 right now picks out neither of them on its own.

The official book is a live database

KRS 7.131 puts the official version of the Kentucky Revised Statutes in an electronic database that the Legislative Research Commission maintains, uses for bill drafting, and makes available to the public. Subsection (2) says what goes in it: all permanent laws of a general nature that are in force in the Commonwealth.

That one word, "force", explains the shape of everything else. The database is a picture of the law that applies, with the law that will apply posted alongside it and dated. Kentucky does not run a parallel archive of what used to apply.

So what happens when January 1, 2027 arrives? The earlier text of KRS 13A.020 stops applying and comes off the page. Follow an old link to it and you land on a page that reads, in Kentucky's own words, that the link "was to a version of a statute that was in effect at the time the document was prepared but has been superseded by a later version or repealed and is no longer valid." The page then offers you the current version, and for the superseded one it gives you an email address for the Reviser of Statutes.

That is the real currency problem in Kentucky. The historical text exists. It lives in one person's inbox.

There is a related trap for anyone storing links. A Kentucky statute URL carries a numeric id, and that id points at a version. Amend the section and the id goes stale, which is how you end up on the invalid-version page while looking at a section that is perfectly alive. Store the KRS number and resolve it fresh.

KRS is what the courts want written

Kentucky's Supreme Court created the Rules of Appellate Procedure in order 2022-49, effective January 1, 2023, replacing the old appellate rules that had lived inside the civil rules. RAP 31(E)(1) is the citation rule, and it is short. Parties shall cite Kentucky statutes from the official edition of the Kentucky Revised Statutes, which may be abbreviated KRS.

No state name in front. No "Ann." on the end. Just KRS 13A.020.

The same rule gives the case templates, and they are worth copying exactly:

Statute               KRS 13A.020
Supreme Court case    Doe v. Roe, ___ S.W.2d ___ (Ky. [date])
Court of Appeals      Doe v. Roe, ___ S.W.3d ___ (Ky. App. [date])
Regulation            201 KAR 5:020
Emergency regulation  201 KAR 5:020E
AG opinion            OAG 25-13

Case names should be italicised. Note that the court designator is doing all the work in a Kentucky case cite, because the reporter is regional.

Court rules are bound up with the statutes in Kentucky in a way that surprises people. KRS 7.134(1)(e) requires a certified version of the KRS to carry the rules of the Supreme Court, the Rules of Civil Procedure, the Rules of Criminal Procedure and any other judicial material the Commission specifies. The rule book travels with the statute book, which is part of why the corpus holds 1,427 court rule sections.

KAR counts whole regulations

A Kentucky regulation cite reads title, then chapter, then regulation. 201 KAR 5:020 is Title 201, Chapter 005, Regulation 020, and the Legislative Research Commission labels it in exactly those words on its own page.

Here is the bit that trips up anyone comparing states. The regulation is the unit. Open 201 KAR 5:020 and you find Section 1, Section 2 and Section 3 inside it. Those sections do not get their own citations. So 4,780 regulations against 1,427 court rule sections is a difference in what gets counted, and a Kentucky rule book that looks small on paper is not.

Two more things attach to that number. The trailing E means emergency: under KRS 13A.190 an emergency regulation takes effect on filing and expires 270 days later, or sooner if an ordinary regulation on the same matter is adopted. Strip the E while parsing and you will read a dead emergency text as the standing rule.

And ordinary regulations expire too. KRS 13A.3102 and KRS 13A.3104 set an expiration date for each one, and the agency avoids it by reviewing the regulation in full and filing a certification letter with the regulations compiler in the twelve months before that date. The Commission publishes the last-effective-date list that drives it. When did you last check the expiry on a regulation you were relying on?

Five minutes on a Kentucky cite

Say a contract template cites KRS 13A.020 with no date attached.

1. Open the chapter listing and count the entries under that number. Two means a dated change is pending.
2. Read the parentheticals. One will say effective until a date, the other effective from it.
3. Decide which one your facts fall under, and write the date into your own cite so the next reader does not repeat this.
4. Check the currency line at the head of the chapter for the session it runs through.
5. If you need the text as it read before, email the Reviser of Statutes. That is the route Kentucky gives you.

What bites

Undated cites are the main one. A KRS number is a stable address and the text at that address can be two things at once.

Stale statute ids are the second. They fail loudly, which is a mercy, but they fail on live law.

The third is quieter. The corpus carries 2,360 superseded statute sections against 18,807 in force, and against only 2 marked repealed. That ratio is Kentucky's publishing style showing through. Sections do not mostly die in Kentucky. They get replaced on a date, and the replaced text steps off the page.

Facts used

All Kentucky corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.