Prohibition Era · The repeal, and the only amendment ratified by state conventions instead of legislatures
Ratified in 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment repeals the Eighteenth outright — and used a ratification method Article V allows but that’s never been used before or since: special state conventions, not state legislatures.
The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.
Twenty-First Amendment, Section 1, ratified 1933
A Deliberately Different Ratification Path
Article V allows two ratification methods: approval by state legislatures, or by special conventions called in each state specifically for that purpose. Every other amendment in American history has used the legislature route. This one used conventions instead — a real, one-time choice, partly to bypass legislatures still influenced by well-organized anti-alcohol lobbying that had shaped Prohibition’s original passage.
Repeal didn’t mean states lost all power to regulate alcohol
A common misconception is that this amendment simply returned alcohol policy to a pre-1919 free-for-all. Its own Section 2 explicitly preserves states’ power to regulate or ban alcohol within their own borders — the direct legal basis for “dry counties” that still exist in parts of the country today, and for the patchwork of differing state alcohol laws that followed repeal rather than one uniform national policy.
