By: Aaron Withers
Suppose a groom on a Bourbon County horse farm was fired in March 2021 after telling the farm manager she was pregnant, a reason the Kentucky Civil Rights Act forbids. On the day she was fired, Kentucky law gave her five years to sue,[1] and she filed in February 2026, a month before that period ran. The farm has moved to dismiss on the basis of House Bill 320 (“HB 320”), which in 2024 reduced the period for her claim to three years from accrual.[2] Read literally, HB 320 would have barred her claim in March 2024, four months before the statute even took effect.
HB 320 took effect on July 15, 2024, and it says nothing about claims that accrued before that date.[3] The omission reaches well beyond one hypothetical, because any farm with eight or more employees is an employer under the Civil Rights Act,[4] and every discrimination or wrongful-discharge claim that accrued in the five years before the effective date now depends on how courts read the Act’s silence. Last year, the Kentucky Court of Appeals encountered the same silence in HB 320’s long-arm provision, called its retroactivity “not beyond reasonable dispute,” and declined to resolve it.[5] The limitations provisions raise the same question, and this blog argues that every claim that accrued before July 15, 2024 should remain governed by the five-year limitation in force when it accrued.
The constitutional boundary is well established in Kentucky courts: a legislature may shorten a limitations period and apply it to existing claims, but it may not use the shorter period to cut off a claim without leaving the claimant reasonable time to sue.[6] Kentucky’s highest court said as much in 1914, in a dispute over McCracken County land sold for taxes,[7] and again in 1968 in Crawford v. V. & C. Coal Co., which involved a coal miner whose limitations period the General Assembly rewrote twice before he learned he had black lung.[8]
The farm’s strongest response is that statutes of limitations are procedural. Kentucky courts have applied procedural statutes to suits filed after their effective dates even when the underlying events occurred earlier,[9] and Kentucky law places statutes relating to remedies outside the general rule against retroactivity.[10] On that view, HB 320 governs every suit filed on or after July 15, 2024, which is how at least one law firm has described the statute to Kentucky employers.[11]
That argument runs into KRS 446.080(3), which directs that no statute be construed as retroactive unless expressly so declared, and HB 320 contains no such declaration.[12] In Purdy v. Palmore, the Kentucky Supreme Court applied that rule to an amendment of a limitations statute and rejected the argument that the amendment escaped it as procedural, observing that the General Assembly had drawn no such distinction.[13] The remedial exception does not fit either, because Kentucky defines a remedial statute as one that operates “in furtherance of the remedy”[14] or provides “no more than the expansion of an existing remedy,”[15] and a statute that takes two years away from a claimant neither furthers nor expands her remedy. Applying Kentucky law, the Sixth Circuit treated a statute shortening the time before traveler’s checks were presumed abandoned as substantive and therefore prospective, because altering the time that must pass alters the circumstances giving rise to the remedy.[16]
The court in Heath took a different approach, applying the new period to existing claims and deciding case by case how much time was reasonable.[17] That reasoning, however, requires a court to write the grace period the General Assembly omitted, and the Kentucky Supreme Court has since made clear that the judiciary lacks authority to add words to a statute to render it constitutional.[18] Nor would a judicially supplied window give claimants much security, given that the court in Crawford found three months and six days to be enough.[19] A prospective construction avoids that uncertainty without adding a word, and, as the Sixth Circuit recognized, resolving the statutory question first makes it unnecessary to reach the constitutional question.
A farm that employs at least eight people needs to know whether it must keep records of a 2021 termination until 2026 or could have discarded them in 2024, and under a case-by-case rule it learns the answer only after a court decides. The next silent amendment may also govern claims tied more closely to land and minerals. When Indiana extinguished dormant mineral interests, the Supreme Court in Texaco, Inc. v. Short upheld the statute in part because the legislature itself had given owners two years to preserve them,[20] and a mineral owner, or a miner in Crawford’s position, should not have to litigate the length of a grace period the General Assembly never wrote.
This reading carries a cost, because the three-year period will not govern every claim until July 2029. That cost follows from the legislature’s own silence, however, and the General Assembly has shown it knows how to avoid it: in 2017 and 2018 it wrote transition clauses into workers’ compensation amendments specifying which claims the new rules reached, and the Kentucky Supreme Court enforced them.[21] The General Assembly should now add a default rule to KRS Chapter 446 providing that, unless an act shortening a limitations period states otherwise, the prior period governs claims that accrued before the act took effect. Until it does, Kentucky courts should apply KRS 446.080(3) as written, hold that claims accruing before July 15, 2024, remain subject to the five-year period, and treat the groom’s February 2026 complaint as timely.
[1] Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 413.120(2); see Tyson Gorman, House Bill 320: Impact of a Shortened Statute of Limitations for Employment Claims, Bricker, Graydon, Wyatt, LLP (Sept. 13, 2024), https://www.bricker.com/employment-law-report/house-bill-320-impact-of-a-shortened-statute-of-limitations-for-employment-claims [https://perma.cc/8FW6-JH7N].
[2] Act of Apr. 10, 2024, ch. 157, § 1, 2024 Ky. Acts 1449, 1449 (codified at Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 413.115).
[3] See id.; Ky. Const. § 55.
[4] Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 344.030(2).
[5] Valentine v. Samsung SDI Co., No. 2024-CA-0277-MR, 2025 WL 3038404, at *2–4 (Ky. Ct. App. Oct. 31, 2025).
[6] Heath v. Hazelip, 167 S.W. 905, 907–08 (Ky. 1914); Crawford v. V. & C. Coal Co., 432 S.W.2d 403, 404 (Ky. 1968).
[7] Heath, 167 S.W. at 905–06.
[8] Crawford, 432 S.W.2d at 403–04.
[9] Rose v. E. W. Bliss Co., 516 S.W.2d 329, 330 (Ky. 1974).
[10] Peabody Coal Co. v. Gossett, 819 S.W.2d 33, 36 (Ky. 1991).
[11] Derek Miles, New Three-Year Statute of Limitations for Employment Claims in Kentucky: What Employers Need to Know, DBL L. (June 26, 2024), https://www.dbllaw.com/new-three-year-statute-of-limitations-for-employment-claims-in-kentucky-what-employers-need-to-know/ [https://perma.cc/8TTD-E6PH].
[12] Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 446.080(3).
[13] Purdy v. Palmore, 789 S.W.2d 12, 14 (Ky. 1990).
[14] Peabody Coal, 819 S.W.2d at 36 (quoting 73 Am. Jur. 2d Statutes § 354 (1974)).
[15] Ky. Ins. Guar. Ass’n v. Jeffers ex rel. Jeffers, 13 S.W.3d 606, 609 (Ky. 2000).
[16] Am. Express Travel Related Servs. Co. v. Kentucky, 730 F.3d 628, 632–33 (6th Cir. 2013).
[17] Heath, 167 S.W. at 909.
[18] Commonwealth v. Harrelson, 14 S.W.3d 541, 546 (Ky. 2000).
[19] Crawford, 432 S.W.2d at 404–05.
[20] Texaco, Inc. v. Short, 454 U.S. 516, 518–19, 532–33 (1982).
[21] Martin v. Warrior Coal LLC, 617 S.W.3d 391, 396–400 (Ky. 2021); Holcim v. Swinford, 581 S.W.3d 37, 43–44 (Ky. 2019).