Abstract: This study traces an aspect of state constitutional development in general, and in Kentucky and Ohio in particular, from the 1840s until shortly before America entered World War One. It examines how and why state constitutions developed into quasi-legislative documents that addressed economic relationships unrelated to the structure of government or citizens' rights and thereby limited the power of state legislatures by constitutionalizing various policies involving corporations, banks, railroads, assessment and uses of taxes, debtor-creditor relations, and employer-employee relations, and the like. Its principal argument is that starting in the 1840s, and subject to regional and other variables, constitution drafters, almost always in the context of constitutional conventions, whether wittingly or not, usurped legislative powers and transformed class issues into constitutional ones. There is a direct link between much of this constitutional legislation and the consequences of expanding market and industrial capitalism. Advocates of constitutional reform increasingly saw state legislatures as corrupt captives of 'capitalists,' and other 'special interests,' and therefore could not to be trusted to serve the people's interests. In this context, 'the people' usually meant adult white male independent producers (farmers, artisans, and small proprietors), and their interests were usually taken to mean assuring more open and equal access to economic opportunity. This distrust of state legislature and corresponding proclivity towards constitutional legislation went hand in hand with the increasing democratization of state governments. These issues permeated debates over constitutional reform over much of the nineteenth century culminating in the Progressives' campaigns for adoption of initiative and referendum provisions and the expansion of state regulation of economic enterprises during the decade before America's entry into the First World War. An opening chapter provides an overview of these issues over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chapters Two and Three examine Kentucky's and Ohio's antebellum exercises in constitutional reform. Chapters Four and Five then examine the two states' post Civil War constitutional conventions (Kentucky in 1890, and Ohio in 1873-1874 and 1912).