Justice Johnson delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Justice Green, Justice Willett, Justice Lehrmann, and Justice Devine joined.
In this declaratory judgment action several individuals practicing commercial eyebrow threading and the salon owners employing them assert that, as applied to them, Texas's licensing statutes and regulations violate the Texas Constitution's due course of law provision. They claim that most of the 750 hours of training Texas requires for a license to practice commercial eyebrow threading are not related to health and safety or what threaders actually do. The State concedes that over 40% of the required hours are unrelated, but maintains that the licensing requirements are nevertheless constitutional.
The trial court and court of appeals agreed with the State. We do not. We reverse and remand to the trial court for further proceedings.
Eyebrow threading is a grooming practice mainly performed in South Asian and Middle Eastern communities. It involves the removal of eyebrow hair and shaping of eyebrows with cotton thread. "Threading," as it is most commonly known, is increasingly practiced in Texas on a commercial basis. Threaders tightly wind a single strand of cotton thread, form a loop in it with their fingers, tighten the loop, and then quickly brush the thread along the skin of the client, trapping unwanted hair in the loop and removing it. In 2011, commercial threading became regulated in Texas when the Legislature categorized it as a practice of "cosmetology." See TEX. OCC. CODE § 1602.002(a)(8) ("`[C]osmetology' means the practice of performing or offering to perform for compensation ... [the] remov[al] [of] superfluous hair from a person's body using depilatories, preparations, or tweezing techniques...."). That categorization and its effects underlie this case.
In order to legally practice cosmetology in Texas a person must hold either a general operator's license or, in certain instances, a more limited but easier-to-obtain esthetician license. Id. § 1602.251(a). Licensing requirements for general operators include completing a minimum of 1,500 hours of instruction in a licensed beauty culture school and passing a state-mandated test. Id. § 1602.254; 16 TEX. ADMIN. CODE § 83.20(a). Requirements for an esthetician license include completing a minimum of 750 hours of instruction in an approved training program and passing a state-mandated test. TEX. OCC. CODE § 1602.257(b); 16 TEX. ADMIN. CODE § 83.20(b). Commercial eyebrow threaders must have at least an esthetician license. See TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 1602.002(a)(8), .257; see also 16 TEX. ADMIN. CODE § 83.10(36).
In late 2008 and early 2009, TDLR inspected Justringz — a threading business with kiosk locations in malls across Texas — and found Nazira Nasruddin Momin and Vijay Lakshmi Yogi performing eyebrow threading without licenses. TDLR issued Notices of Alleged Violations to them for the unlicensed practice of cosmetology. Minaz Chamadia was also performing threading at Justringz without a license, but she was not cited by TDLR. The administrative hearings and fines pending against Momin and Yogi have been stayed pursuant to a Rule 11 Agreement. See TEX. R. CIV. P. 11.
Ashish Patel and Anverali Satani own threading salons named Perfect Browz. The State has not taken any administrative action related to Perfect Browz. Satani is the sole owner of another threading business, Browz and Henna. TDLR inspected and investigated Browz and Henna on the basis of complaints filed against it. Although Satani received two warnings for Browz and Henna employing unlicensed threaders, the Department did not issue a Notice of Alleged Violation. Like the proceedings against Momin and Yogi, prosecution of Browz and Henna has been stayed by agreement of the parties.
In December 2009, Patel, Satani, Momin, Chamadia, and Yogi (collectively, the Threaders) brought suit against TDLR, its executive director, the Commission, and the Commission's members (collectively, the State) pursuant to the Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act (UDJA) seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. See TEX. CIV. PRAC. & REM. CODE §§ 37.001-.004, .006,.010. The Threaders alleged that the cosmetology statutes and administrative rules issued pursuant to those statutes (collectively, the cosmetology scheme) were unreasonable as applied to eyebrow threading and violated their constitutional right "to earn an honest living in the occupation of one's choice free from unreasonable governmental interference." They specifically sought declaratory judgment that, as applied to them, the cosmetology statutes and associated regulations violate the privileges and immunities and due course guarantees of Article I, § 19 of the Texas Constitution. They also sought a permanent injunction barring the State from enforcing the cosmetology scheme relating to the commercial practice of eyebrow threading against them.
The Threaders moved for summary judgment, contending that "application of the state's cosmetology laws and administrative rules to the commercial practice of eyebrow threading is unconstitutional because it places senseless burdens on eyebrow threaders and threading businesses without any actual benefit to public health and safety." The motion urged that the State could not constitutionally regulate the commercial practice of eyebrow threading as conventional cosmetology unless it could establish a real and substantial relationship between the statutes and regulations and the public's health and safety, and the State could not meet this standard. The State filed both a plea to the jurisdiction and a traditional motion for summary judgment. By its plea to the jurisdiction, the State challenged the Threaders' standing, contending that their claims were barred by sovereign immunity
The district court denied the State's plea to the jurisdiction, granted its motion for summary judgment, and denied the Threaders' motion for summary judgment. Both parties appealed.
The court of appeals affirmed. Patel v. Tex. Dep't of Licensing & Regulation, 464 S.W.3d 369 (Tex.App.-Austin 2012). As to the State's jurisdictional issues, the court held that the Threaders' suit was not barred by sovereign immunity or the redundant remedies doctrine, the Threaders had standing, and their claims were ripe. Id. at 378-79. As to the merits, the appeals court concluded that under either the real and substantial or rational basis test, the State established that the challenged cosmetology scheme, as applied to the Threaders, does not violate Article I, § 19. Id. at 380.
In this Court the Threaders argue that (1) the real and substantial test governs substantive due process challenges to statutes and regulations affecting economic interests when the challenges are brought under Article I, § 19 of the Texas Constitution; (2) the cosmetology statutes and rules are unconstitutional as applied to the Threaders because they have no real and substantial connection to a legitimate governmental objective; and (3) even if rational basis review is the correct constitutional test, under the appropriate test, the statutes and regulations are unconstitutional as applied to the Threaders.
The State contends that (1) it is immune from declaratory judgment claims raising constitutional challenges to statutes; (2) the Threaders' claims lack both justiciability and ripeness; (3) the claims are barred by the redundant remedies doctrine; (4) the business owners lack standing; (5) there is no real difference between the "real and substantial" and "rational relationship" tests for due process concerns; and (6) threading raises public health concerns, implicating valid governmental concerns, thus the challenged licensing statutes and regulations that address these concerns comport with the substantive due process requirements regardless of which test is applied.
We address the arguments in turn, necessarily beginning with the jurisdictional issues the State raises. See Rusk State Hosp. v. Black, 392 S.W.3d 88, 95 (Tex. 2012) (noting that if a court does not have jurisdiction, its opinion addressing any issues other than jurisdiction is advisory).
Sovereign immunity implicates a trial court's jurisdiction, and, when it applies, precludes suit against a governmental entity. Tex. Dep't of Parks & Wildlife v. Miranda, 133 S.W.3d 217, 224 (Tex. 2004); Tex. Natural Res. Conservation Comm'n v. IT-Davy, 74 S.W.3d 849, 853 (Tex.2002). The State acknowledges this Court's decisions to the effect that sovereign immunity is inapplicable when a suit challenges the constitutionality of a statute
In Heinrich we decided that sovereign immunity does not prohibit suits brought to require state officials to comply with statutory or constitutional provisions. 284 S.W.3d at 372. But, to fall within this "ultra vires exception," a suit must allege that a state official acted without legal authority or failed to perform a purely ministerial act, rather than attack the officer's exercise of discretion. Id. The governmental entities themselves remain immune from suit, though, because unlawful acts of officials are not acts of the State. Id. at 372-73. Thus, we concluded that suits complaining of ultra vires actions may not be brought against a governmental unit, but must be brought against the allegedly responsible government actor in his official capacity. Id. at 373.
We reconfirmed the point in Reconveyance, where we held that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to hear a suit against the Texas Department of Insurance. 306 S.W.3d at 258-59. We concluded that the claims were substantively ultra vires claims because the pleadings alleged the Department of Insurance had acted beyond its statutory authority. Id. That being so, the claims should have been brought against the appropriate state officials in their official capacities. Id.
In this case, the Threaders did not plead that the Department and Commission officials exceeded the authority granted to them; rather, they challenged the constitutionality of the cosmetology statutes and regulations on which the officials based their actions. The State proposes that an official can act ultra vires either by acting inconsistently with a constitutional statute or by acting consistently with an unconstitutional one. It urges that the Threaders' claims fall within the "acting consistently with an unconstitutional statute" category. But the premise underlying the ultra vires exception is that the State is not responsible for unlawful acts of officials. Heinrich, 284 S.W.3d at 372. The State's proposal would effectively immunize it from suits claiming a statute is unconstitutional — an illogical extension of that underlying premise.
Contrary to the State's position, Heinrich and Reconveyance do not represent a departure from the rule that sovereign immunity is inapplicable in a suit against a governmental entity that challenges the constitutionality of a statute and seeks only equitable relief. See id. at 373 n.6. To the contrary, in Heinrich we clarified that "[f]or claims challenging the validity of ... statutes ... the Declaratory Judgment Act requires that the relevant governmental entities be made parties, and thereby waives immunity." Id. (citing Tex. Educ. Agency v. Leeper, 893 S.W.2d 432, 446 (Tex.1994)). And we have reiterated the principle more recently. See Tex. Dep't of Transp. v. Sefzik, 355 S.W.3d 618, 621-22 & n.3 (Tex.2011) (restating that state entities can be — and in some instances such as when the constitutionality of a statute is at issue, must be — parties to challenges under the UDJA); Tex. Lottery Comm'n v.
Next, the State contends that the officials are immune from suit because the Threaders had to prove their claims in order to survive a plea to the jurisdiction. See Heinrich, 284 S.W.3d at 372 ("To fall within this ultra vires exception, a suit must not complain of a government officer's exercise of discretion, but rather must allege, and ultimately prove, that the officer acted without legal authority or failed to perform a purely ministerial act."). The State argues that because the trial court granted summary judgment to the State on the merits, the Threaders did not prove a valid claim, rendering their pleadings insufficient to give the trial court jurisdiction. The State relies on Andrade v. NAACP of Austin, in which we held that the Secretary of State was immune from suit because the constitutional claims against her were non-viable. 345 S.W.3d 1, 6, 11-12, 18 (Tex. 2011). But, our conclusion there simply followed a line of decisions in which we held that claims were not viable due to basic pleading defects. Id. at 13-14. Andrade stands for the unremarkable principle that claims against state officials — like all claims — must be properly pleaded in order to be maintained, not that such claims must be viable on their merits to negate immunity. Id. Because the Threaders' pleadings presented a viable claim, they were sufficient.
Next, the State employs the doctrines of standing, ripeness, and redundant remedies to argue that the courts below, and this Court, lack jurisdiction because the claims of the Threaders are not justiciable. We consider each doctrine in turn.
The standing doctrine identifies suits appropriate for judicial resolution. Brown v. Todd, 53 S.W.3d 297, 305 (Tex. 2001). Standing assures there is a real controversy between the parties that will be determined by the judicial declaration sought. Id. (quoting Tex. Workers' Comp. Comm'n v. Garcia, 893 S.W.2d 504, 517-18 (Tex.1995)). "[T]o challenge a statute, a plaintiff must [both] suffer some actual or threatened restriction under the statute" and "contend that the statute unconstitutionally restricts the plaintiff's rights." Garcia, 893 S.W.2d at 518. The State argues that Patel and Satani — whose claims are based solely on their status as threading salon owners — lack standing because they fail both prongs of the standing test.
Generally, courts must analyze the standing of each individual plaintiff to bring each individual claim he or she alleges. Heckman v. Williamson Cnty., 369 S.W.3d 137, 152 (Tex.2012). However, "where there are multiple plaintiffs in a case, who seek injunctive or declaratory relief (or both), who sue individually, and who all seek the same relief[,] ... the court need not analyze the standing of more than one plaintiff — so long as that plaintiff has standing to pursue as much or more relief than any of the other plaintiffs." Id. at 152 n.64. The reasoning is
Here, Momin and Yogi, the threaders who received Notices of Alleged Violation, have standing, and the State does not contend otherwise. First, they have suffered some actual restriction under the challenged statute because TDLR initiated regulatory proceedings against each of them pursuant to their alleged violations of the Texas cosmetology statutes and regulations. And second, they are contending that the statute unconstitutionally restricts their rights to practice eyebrow threading. Accordingly, because Momin and Yogi have standing, we need not analyze the standing of Patel and Satani.
The State also argues that because the Threaders seek attorneys' fees, the relief ultimately awarded will not necessarily be identical. But standing is determined at the beginning of a case, and whether the relief ultimately granted is the same for all parties is not determinative of the question. Here, Momin and Yogi have standing to seek relief and that is all we need to determine. See Andrade, 345 S.W.3d at 6-11; Barshop v. Medina Cnty. Underground Water Conservation Dist., 925 S.W.2d 618, 626-27 (Tex.1996); Garcia, 893 S.W.2d at 518-19.
The State next argues that the claims brought by Patel, Satani, and Chamadia are not ripe because Patel, Satani, and Chamadia have not faced administrative enforcement. We disagree.
Under the ripeness doctrine, courts must "consider whether, at the time a lawsuit is filed, the facts are sufficiently developed `so that an injury has occurred or is likely to occur, rather than being contingent or remote.'" Waco Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Gibson, 22 S.W.3d 849, 851-52 (Tex.2000) (emphasis in original) (citations omitted). Thus, the ripeness analysis focuses on whether a case involves uncertain or contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated or may not occur at all. Id. at 852.
Here, although Patel, Satani, and Chamadia have not yet faced administrative enforcement, the threat of harm is more than conjectural, hypothetical, or remote. Satani's business, Browz and Henna, has received two warnings for employing unlicensed threaders, and he has been referred to TDLR's legal department for enforcement. Patel and Satani risk $5,000 in penalties daily for employing unlicensed threaders. TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 51.302(a), 1602.403(c)(1). And Chamadia works at the same threading salon where Momin and Yogi were cited. Because at the time the lawsuit was filed Chamadia was performing threading services without a cosmetology license and Patel and Satani were employing threaders who did not have cosmetology licenses, these individuals were subject to a real threat of likely civil and criminal proceedings, as well as administrative proceedings that could result in penalties and sanctions. See Mitz v. Tex. State Bd. of Veterinary Med. Exam'rs, 278 S.W.3d 17, 26 (Tex.App.-Austin 2008, pet. dism'd by agr.) (holding that a constitutional challenge to a state-licensing law is ripe when enforcement of the law is "sufficiently likely" to occur). Therefore, their claims are ripe.
The State also seeks to dismiss the claims of the Threaders who have received
The State maintains that the Legislature has provided Momin and Yogi two alternative avenues under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA): (1) a suit for judicial review alleging that the administrative decision was "in violation of a constitutional or statutory provision," TEX. GOV'T CODE § 2001.174(2)(A); or (2) a suit for a pre-enforcement declaratory judgment alleging "that the rule or its threatened application interferes with or impairs, or threatens to interfere with or impair, a legal right or privilege of the plaintiff." Id. § 2001.038(a). The State contends that because either of those APA provisions permits Yogi and Momin to file suits that would redress their alleged injuries, they may not pursue relief under the UDJA.
We disagree with the State's assertion that a favorable decision under Section 2001.174 of the APA — authorizing courts to review administrative decisions — would obviate the need for the relief the Threaders seek. See id. § 2001.174 (allowing state courts to reverse or remand existing agency orders, but not enjoin future ones). The available remedies on appeal from an administrative finding are limited to reversal of the particular orders at issue. Id. But the Threaders seek more than a reversal of the citations issued to Momin and Yogi. They seek prospective injunctive relief against future agency orders based on the statutes and regulations. Accordingly, because the declaration sought goes beyond reversal of an agency order, Section 2001.174 of the APA does not provide a redundant remedy.
The State's contention that Section 2001.038 of the APA creates an avenue for pre-enforcement declaratory judgment that an agency rule is invalid and would redress the Threaders' alleged injuries is likewise unavailing. When a plaintiff files a proceeding that only challenges the validity of an administrative rule, the parties are bound by the APA and may not seek relief under the UDJA because such relief would be redundant. See Leeper, 893 S.W.2d at 443-44. The APA defines a rule as:
Having concluded that the lower courts had jurisdiction, we turn to the merits.
Article I, § 19 of the Texas Constitution provides that
TEX. CONST. art. I, § 19.
We have at least twice noted that Texas courts have not been entirely consistent in the standard of review applied when economic legislation is challenged under Section 19's substantive due course of law protections. See Trinity River Auth. v. URS Consultants, Inc.-Tex., 889 S.W.2d 259, 263 & n.5 (Tex.1994); Garcia, 893 S.W.2d at 525. The Threaders go beyond those two cases. They assert that courts considering as-applied substantive due process challenges under Section 19 have mixed and matched three different standards of review through the years. They label those standards as: (1) real and substantial, (2) rational basis including consideration of evidence, and (3) no-evidence rational basis.
The Threaders argue that the first referenced standard — "real and substantial" — is exemplified by cases such as State v. Richards, 157 Tex. 166, 301 S.W.2d 597 (1957); Aladdin's Castle, Inc. v. City of Mesquite, 713 F.2d 137, 138 n.2 (5th Cir. 1983) (applying Texas law); Satterfield v. Crown Cork & Seal Co., 268 S.W.3d 190, 215 (Tex.App.-Austin 2008, no pet.); Texas State Board of Pharmacy v. Gibson's Discount Center, Inc., 541 S.W.2d 884, 887-89 (Tex.Civ.App.-Austin 1976, writ ref'd n.r.e.); City of Houston v. Johnny Frank's Auto Parts Co., 480 S.W.2d 774, 779 (Tex. Civ.App.-Houston [14th Dist.] 1972, writ ref'd n.r.e.); Humble Oil & Refining Co. v. City of Georgetown, 428 S.W.2d 405, 407-08 (Tex.Civ.App.-Austin 1968, no writ); and City of Coleman v. Rhone, 222 S.W.2d 646, 649 (Tex.Civ.App.-Eastland 1949, writ ref'd). They interpret this standard as one in which the reviewing court considers whether (1) the legislative purpose for the statute is a proper one, (2) there is a real and substantial connection between that purpose and the language of the statute as the statute functions in practice, and (3) the statute works an excessive or undue burden on the person challenging the statute in relation to the statutory purpose. They argue that the distinguishing characteristic of cases employing the standard is that the courts using it consider evidence concerning both the government's purpose for a law and the law's real-world impact on the challenging party.
The Threaders recognize that the real and substantial test affords less deference to legislative judgments than does the federal rational basis standard. But they point to In the Interest of J.W.T., 872 S.W.2d 189, 197-98 & n.23 (Tex.1994); Davenport v. Garcia, 834 S.W.2d 4, 10 (Tex.1992); and LeCroy v. Hanlon, 713 S.W.2d 335, 338-41 (Tex.1986), as examples of cases in which this Court specifically said or implied that certain language in the Texas Constitution affords more protection than comparable text in the federal Constitution. They also reference the United States Supreme Court as having noted in City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's
The Threaders present the second standard — "rational basis including consideration of evidence" — as being exemplified by cases such as City of San Antonio v. TPLP Office Park Properties, L.P., 218 S.W.3d 60, 65-66 (Tex.2007); Garcia, 893 S.W.2d at 525-26; Limon v. State, 947 S.W.2d 620, 627-29 (Tex.App.-Austin 1997, no writ); and Martin v. Wholesome Dairy, Inc., 437 S.W.2d 586, 590-600 (Tex.Civ. App.-Austin 1969, writ ref'd n.r.e.). Courts applying this test, the Threaders
The Threaders reference the third standard as "no evidence rational basis," which they say is embodied in cases such as Barshop, 925 S.W.2d at 625, 632-33; Garcia v. Kubosh, 377 S.W.3d 89, 98-100 (Tex. App.-Houston [1st Dist.] 2012, no pet.); Lens Express v. Ewald, 907 S.W.2d 64 (Tex.App.-Austin 1995, no writ); and Texas Optometry Board v. Lee Vision Center, Inc., 515 S.W.2d 380, 385-86 (Tex.Civ. App.-Eastland 1974, writ ref'd n.r.e.). Under the no-evidence version of the rational basis test, they argue, economic regulations do not violate Section 19 if they have any conceivable justification in a legitimate state interest, regardless of whether the justification is advanced by the government or "invented" by the reviewing court, and evidence "seldom" matters.
The Threaders say both the "real and substantial" and "rational basis including consideration of evidence" standards have two prongs, with the first being the primary difference between them. The first prong of the real and substantial standard, they maintain, is whether the challenged statute or regulation has a real and substantial connection to a legitimate governmental objective. They contrast that test with the rational basis including consideration of evidence standard, which they argue is more lenient and favorable toward the government because it asks only whether a statute or regulation arguably could bear some rational relationship to a legitimate governmental objective. They further maintain that for both standards the second prong is whether, on balance, the challenged statute or rule imposes an arbitrary or unduly harsh burden on the challenger in light of the government's objective.
In light of the parties' contentions, we first briefly review the history of the due course of law language in Article I, § 19.
The Declaration of Rights of the 1836 Republic of Texas Constitution included three separate rights guaranteeing "due course of law" or the "due course of the law of the land": (1) the sixth, which (among other protections) prevented an accused in a criminal proceeding from being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, but by due course of law"; (2) the eleventh, which provided that an injured person "shall have remedy by due course of law"; and (3) the seventh, which provided that "[n]o citizen shall be deprived of privileges, outlawed, exiled, or in any manner disenfranchised, except by due course of the law of the land." REP. OF TEX. CONST. OF 1836, Declaration of Rights 6-7, 11, reprinted in 1 H.P.N. Gammel, The Laws of Texas 1822-1897, at 1083 (Austin, Gammel Book Co. 1898).
In 1845, a group of delegates met to draft and propose Texas's first state constitution. The committee responsible for drafting the Bill of Rights proposed including two due course of law clauses — not the three clauses in the Declaration of Rights of the 1836 Republic of Texas Constitution. Comm. on Bill of Rights & Gen. Provisions, Journals of the Convention, Assembled at the City of Austin on the Fourth of July, 1845, for the Purpose of Framing a Constitution for the State of Texas, assembled July 11, 1845, at 34 (Austin, Mine & Cruger 1845), available at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/texas1845/journals. One of the suggested clauses protected an injured party's right to have "remedy by due course of law." Id. The other clause incorporated the criminal due
The language in the Due Course of Law Clause was not changed in the Texas Constitutions adopted in 1861, 1866, and 1869. See TEX. CONST. OF 1861, art. I, § 16; TEX. CONST. OF 1866, art. I, § 16; TEX. CONST. OF 1869, art. I, § 16. But the Constitutional Convention of 1875 reexamined the clause and proposed changing it to its current language. Comm. on Bill of Rights, Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Texas, Begun and Held at the City of Austin, September 6th, 1875, assembled Oct. 2, 1875, at 274 (Galveston, News Office 1875), available at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/texas1876/journals. The proposals were adopted, resulting in the clause reading as it now does. See TEX. CONST. art. I, § 19.
In 1873, two years before the convention that proposed the 1875 Texas Constitution, the United States Supreme Court interpreted the phrase "privileges or immunities" in the United States Constitution in the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873). There, several butchers challenged a Louisiana statute granting a single slaughtering company a monopoly on the butchering of animals in New Orleans. Id. at 38-39. The statute was challenged under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. Id. at 58-59. In rejecting the butchers' claims, the Court discerned a distinction in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment between the "privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States" and those of "citizens of the several states," and concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment protected only privileges and immunities which owed their existence to the federal government. Id. at 74, 78-79. It was the obligation of the states, according to the Supreme Court, to protect "privileges or immunities" founded in state citizenship, including even such fundamental rights as the right to acquire and possess property and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety. Id. at 74-78. Thus, discussions preceding proposal and adoption of the 1875 Texas Constitution were held against the backdrop of recent Supreme Court mandates placing guardianship of non-federal rights of individuals squarely in the hands of the states. See DEBATES IN THE TEXAS CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION OF 1875, 292 (Seth S. McKay ed., Univ. of Tex. 1930).
Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1868 seemed to hasten development of substantive due process jurisprudence. See THOMAS M. COOLEY, A TREATISE ON THE CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS WHICH REST UPON THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION 354-56 (1868). The view in Texas was the same, as exemplified by cases such as Milliken v. City Council of Weatherford, 54 Tex. 388 (1881).
Id. at 653. In accord with decisions from the United States Supreme Court, this Court rejected the city's contention that a legislative judgment was conclusive. Id. at 653-54. The Court determined that the lower courts erred by upholding the ordinance without providing the railroad an opportunity to present evidence regarding the unreasonableness of the ordinance. Id.
Texas judicial decisions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century indicated that the Texas Due Course of Law Clause and the federal Due Process Clause were nearly, if not exactly, coextensive. Such decisions generally tracked the thinking expressed by the Court in Mellinger v. City of Houston, 68 Tex. 37, 3 S.W. 249, 252-53 (1887), where the Court held that Article I, § 19 was not violated under the facts of that case because of the United States Supreme Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in a similar case. During this period, Texas courts frequently addressed whether a legislative enactment was a proper exercise of the governmental unit's police power, examining justifications for the enactment and typically relying on decisions from the United States Supreme Court as guidance. See, e.g., Mabee v. McDonald, 107 Tex. 139, 175 S.W. 676, 680 (1915) ("`Due process of law,' as used in the fourteenth amendment, and `due course of the law of the land,' as used in Article I, § 19, of the Constitution of Texas, ... according to the great weight of authority, are, in nearly if not all respects, practically synonymous."), rev'd on other grounds, 243 U.S. 90, 92, 37 S.Ct. 343, 61 L.Ed. 608 (1917) (holding that federal Due Process Clause was violated); St. Louis Sw. Ry. Co. of Tex. v. Griffin, 106 Tex. 477, 171 S.W. 703, 704-07 (1914) (holding statute impairing corporation's right to discharge employees at will violated liberty of contract protected by both federal and state Constitutions); Bruhl v. State, 111 Tex.Crim. 233, 13 S.W.2d 93, 94-95 (1928) (statute prohibiting non-optometrist merchant from assisting a customer in purchase of eyeglasses violated both Article I, § 19 and the Fourteenth Amendment). Occasionally, Texas courts mentioned that a proper review involved examining the enactment for a "real or substantial" relationship to the government's police power interest in public
As to federal due process standards, this period before 1935 is sometimes referred to as the "Lochner period" in reference to the United States Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S.Ct. 539, 49 L.Ed. 937 (1905). There, the Court considered a statute regulating the number of hours that bakers could work, enacted ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the health of bakers. Id. at 45-47, 58, 25 S.Ct. 539. The Court determined that the legislatively declared purpose for an enactment could be disregarded by a court reviewing challenges to the statute and that
Id. at 64, 25 S.Ct. 539. The Court held that the law was intended only "to regulate the hours of labor between the master and his employees" despite the legislature's stated purpose of concern for the health of bakers. Id. Because the Fourteenth Amendment did not permit such a regulation without a legitimate health and safety justification, the Court struck down the law. Justice Holmes, in dissent, advanced a much more deferential standard of review:
Id. at 68, 25 S.Ct. 539 (Holmes, J., dissenting) (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The Court remained within the bounds charted by Lochner for several years. See, e.g., Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923); N.Y. Life Ins. Co. v. Dodge, 246 U.S. 357, 38 S.Ct. 337, 62 L.Ed. 772 (1918); Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 36 S.Ct. 7, 60 L.Ed. 131 (1915); Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1, 35 S.Ct. 240, 59 L.Ed. 441 (1915), overruled in part by Phelps Dodge Corp. v. Nat'l Labor Relations Bd., 313 U.S. 177, 187, 61 S.Ct. 845, 85 L.Ed. 1271 (1941); Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161, 28 S.Ct. 277, 52 L.Ed. 436 (1908), overruled in part by Phelps Dodge Corp., 313 U.S. at 187, 61 S.Ct. 845. Basically, then, during the "Lochner era," substantive due process
The federal landscape changed in 1938. In United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144, 58 S.Ct. 778, 82 L.Ed. 1234 (1938), the Supreme Court pronounced that
Id. at 152, 58 S.Ct. 778. Ensuing federal decisions tracked Carolene Products' guidance that economic regulatory laws were presumed to be constitutional absent evidence or judicially known facts demonstrating that no rational basis existed for the regulation. For example, in 1955 in Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc., the Supreme Court explained that
348 U.S. 483, 488, 75 S.Ct. 461, 99 L.Ed. 563 (1955).
Texas courts were faced with the question of whether, after Carolene Products, to stay the course as to prior decisions interpreting Article I, § 19's due course of law provision, or follow the lead of the United States Supreme Court as to the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. That is, Texas courts had to decide whether "due process of law," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, and "due course of law of the land," as used in Article I, § 19 of the Texas Constitution, remained "in nearly if not all respects, practically synonymous," or whether the meaning of the Texas Constitution remained the same as it had been earlier interpreted because the Constitution's language had not been amended through the political process. See Mabee, 175 S.W. at 680. As the parties to this case — and numerous Texas courts and commentators — have pointed out, the answer has not been made clear as to substantive due process challenges to governmental regulation of economic interests. As set out more fully above, the Threaders argue that in some cases this Court
Following the lead of our prior jurisprudence, we conclude that the Texas due course of law protections in Article I, § 19, for the most part, align with the protections found in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But, that having been said, the drafting, proposing, and adopting of the 1875 Constitution was accomplished shortly
In sum, statutes are presumed to be constitutional. To overcome that presumption, the proponent of an as-applied challenge to an economic regulation statute under Section 19's substantive due course of law requirement must demonstrate that either (1) the statute's purpose could not arguably be rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest; or (2) when considered as a whole, the statute's actual, real-world effect as applied to the challenging party could not arguably be rationally related to, or is so burdensome as to be oppressive in light of, the governmental interest.
To be clear, the foregoing standard includes the presumption that legislative enactments are constitutional, e.g., Smith v. Davis, 426 S.W.2d 827, 831 (Tex.1968), and places a high burden on parties claiming a statute is unconstitutional. See, e.g., Tex. State Bd. of Barber Exam'rs v. Beaumont Barber Coll., Inc., 454 S.W.2d 729, 732 (Tex.1970). The presumption of constitutionality and the high burden to show unconstitutionality would apply as well to regulations adopted by an agency pursuant to statutory authority. See Trapp v. Shell Oil Co., 145 Tex. 323, 198 S.W.2d 424, 428 (1946). Although whether a law is unconstitutional is a question of law, the determination will in most instances require the reviewing court to consider the entire record, including evidence offered by the parties. Garcia, 893 S.W.2d at 520.
The Threaders do not contend that the State's licensing of the commercial practice of cosmetology is not rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest.
Several statutes address safety standards and sanitary conditions relating to cosmetology. See TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 1602.001, 1603.001. Commission rules also address public safety and sanitary conditions. E.g., 16 TEX. ADMIN. CODE §§ 83.50(a), .53(a)-(b), .70(i), .71(b), .100-.115. To address competency of cosmetologists in Texas, the Legislature and Commission have imposed specific educational and training requirements for cosmetologists, estheticians, and salon operators. TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 1602.001, .254, .255, .257. To become a licensed esthetician, threaders must take at least 750 hours of instruction in a Commission-approved training program, id. § 1602.254(b)(3), and take State-prescribed practical and written examinations. See 16 TEX. ADMIN. CODE §§ 83.20(a)(6), .21(c), .21(e). Those training programs must devote at least 225 hours of instruction to facial treatments, cleansing, masking, and therapy; 90 hours to anatomy and physiology; 75 hours to electricity, machines, and related equipment; 75 hours to makeup; 50 hours to orientation, rules, and laws; 50 hours to chemistry; 50 hours to care of clients; 40 hours to sanitation, safety, and first aid; 35 hours to management; 25 hours to superfluous hair removal; 15 hours to aroma therapy; 10 hours to nutrition; and 10 hours to color psychology. Id. § 83.120(b). Commission-approved beauty schools are not required to teach threading techniques. The schools are required to provide 25 hours of instruction in superfluous hair removal, which encompasses threading, but individual schools decide which techniques to teach. The record reflects that fewer than ten of the 389 Commission-approved Texas beauty schools teach threading techniques, and only one of those devotes more than a few hours to them. Further, threading techniques are not required to be part of the mandated tests. Both the practical and written tests are administered and scored by a third-party testing firm. The firm's testing guidelines show that the practical examination is an hour and thirty minutes in length and includes sanitation, disinfection and hair removal, but does not include threading, although a test-taker may elect to remove six hairs from the model's eyebrow using thread instead of tweezers during part of the exam. Nor does the written examination include questions as to threading techniques, although it includes globally relevant questions about sanitation, disinfection, and safety.
As shown above, of the 750 hours of required instruction for an esthetician license, 40 are required to be directly devoted to sanitation, safety, and first aid. Id.
One argument the Threaders make, which at its core challenges the rationality of any required training, is that the unlicensed practice of eyebrow threading is simply not a threat to public health and safety. In support of the argument they reference their expert witness who submitted a report addressing all of the available medical literature on eyebrow threading, as well as her own empirical analysis of the technique's safety. Based on her investigation and professional experience with eyebrow threading, the expert concluded that threading is safe and, from a medical perspective, requires nothing more than basic sanitation training.
But the Threaders' expert also raised public health concerns during her testimony. She testified that threading may lead to the spread of highly contagious bacterial and viral infections, including flat warts, skin-colored lesions known as mulluscum contagiosum, pink eye, ringworm, impetigo, and staphylococcus aureus, among others. She also agreed that failure to utilize appropriate sanitation practices — for example, proper use of disposable materials, cleaning of work stations, effective hand-washing techniques, and correct treatment of skin irritations and abrasions — can further expose threading clients to infection and disease.
Moving beyond the argument that threading does not pose health risks to begin with, the Threaders contend that as many as 710 of the required 750 training hours for an esthetician license are not related to properly training threaders in hygiene and sanitation, considering the activities they actually perform. The State argues that the Threaders greatly exaggerate the number of unrelated hours, but concedes that as many as 320 of the curriculum hours are not related to activities threaders actually perform.
Differentiating between types of cosmetology practices is the prerogative of the Legislature and regulatory agencies to which the Legislature properly delegates authority. And it is not for courts to second-guess their decisions as to the necessity for and the extent of training that should be required for different types of commercial service providers. But we note in passing that persons licensed to apply eyelash extensions — a specialty involving the use of chemicals and a high rate of adverse reactions — are required to undergo only 320 hours of training. See id. We also note that when the Threaders filed suit, hair braiders were required to undergo only 35 hours of training, 16 of which were in health and safety. See id. § 83.120(b). Hair braiding, however, has since been deregulated by the Legislature. See Act of May 13, 1999, 76th Leg., R.S., ch. 388, § 1, sec. 1602.002(2), 1999 Tex. Gen. Laws 1431, 2186, repealed by Act of May 22, 2015, 84th Leg., R.S., H.B. 2717 (to be codified at TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 1601.003, 1602.003(b)(8)).
The fact that approximately 58% of the minimum required training hours are arguably relevant to the activities threaders perform, while 42% of the hours are not, is determinative of the aspect of the second prong of the as-applied standard which asks whether the effect of the requirements as a whole could be rationally related to the governmental interest. They could be. But the percentage must also be considered along with other factors, such as the quantitative aspect of the hours represented by that percentage and the
The dividing line is not bright between the number of required but irrelevant hours that would yield a harsh, but constitutionally acceptable, requirement and the number that would not. Even assuming that 430 hours (a number the Threaders dispute) of the mandated training are arguably relevant to what commercial threaders do in practice, that means threaders are required to undergo the equivalent of eight 40-hour weeks of training unrelated to health and safety as applied to threading. The parties disagree about the costs of attending cosmetology training required for a license to practice threading. The Threaders point to evidence that the cost averages $9,000. The State says the $9,000 cost is for private schools while public schools charge only $3,500. Given the record as to the number of hours of training required for subjects unrelated to threading, our decision neither turns on, nor is altered by, the exact cost. But the admittedly unrelated 320 required training hours, combined with the fact that threader trainees have to pay for the training and at the same time lose the opportunity to make money actively practicing their trade, leads us to conclude that the Threaders have met their high burden of proving that, as applied to them, the requirement of 750 hours of training to become licensed is not just unreasonable or harsh, but it is so oppressive that it violates Article I, § 19 of the Texas Constitution.
The dissenting Justices say four things that bear responding to. First, they say that measuring the effects of the provisions by an "oppressive" standard is to measure it by no standard at all. Post at 135 (Hecht, C.J., dissenting); post at 142 (Guzman, J., dissenting). The actuality of the matter is that the standard they propose for measuring the effects of the provisions is for all practical purposes no standard. The only way an enactment could fail the test the dissenters advocate is if the purpose of the enactment were completely mismatched with — that is, it bore no rational relationship to — the provisions enacted to effect it. For example, assume in this case the record demonstrated conclusively, or the State conceded, that the Threaders are right and only 40 hours of the required training are relevant to safety and sanitation in performing threading. It would not matter under the CHIEF JUSTICE'S proposed standard. For under that standard, so long as at least some part of the required training could be rationally related to safety and sanitation, the entire
Second, the CHIEF JUSTICE references a small minority of other states that require threaders to be licensed either explicitly or by generally requiring licensing of those who commercially remove superfluous hair. Post at 128. But the Threaders neither contest the rationality of the State's requiring them to be licensed, nor the requirement that they take training in subjects such as sanitation and hygiene. What they contest is the excessiveness of the training requirements given the magnitude of the irrelevant training. And whether that excessive requirement violates the Texas Constitution is not determined by the relationship between other states' statutes and regulations and their respective constitutions.
Third, the CHIEF JUSTICE says that articulating and weighing factors such as the cost and relevance of the required training in considering the constitutionality of the provisions is "generally referred to as legislating" and should not be done by judges, post at 135, and JUSTICE GUZMAN asserts that any line drawing in this case should be done by the Legislature, post at 143. But providing standards for measuring the constitutionality of legislative enactments is not only a judicial prerogative — it is necessary in order to make the law predictable and not dependent on the proclivities of whichever judge or judges happen to be considering the case. Indeed, the dissenting Justices would reach the result they propose by measuring the licensing provisions against standards — the standards of "rational relationship" jurisprudence — just different standards. Post at 138-39. Expressing factors by which a statute's constitutionality is to be measured and by which we reach our decision is not legislating; it is judging and providing guidance for courts to use in future challenges to statutes or regulations, which history tells us will come.
Fourth, the CHIEF JUSTICE refers to rediscovering and unleashing "the Lochner monster" if legislative enactments are measured against a standard other than the rational relationship standard. Post at 138. But as discussed above, Texas courts, including this Court, have expressed and applied various standards for considering as-applied substantive due process claims for over a century. And it is those decisions on which the standards we set out today are based. Surely if those cases represented a "monster" running amuck in Texas, this Court would have long ago decisively dealt with it.
Courts must extend great deference to legislative enactments, apply a strong presumption in favor of their validity, and maintain a high bar for declaring any of them in violation of the Constitution. But judicial deference is necessarily constrained where constitutional protections are implicated.
The provisions of the Texas Occupations Code and Commission rules promulgated pursuant to that Code requiring the individual Threaders to undergo at least 750 hours of training in order to obtain a state license before practicing commercial threading violate the Texas Constitution.
We reverse the judgment of the court of appeals and remand the case to the trial
Justice Willett filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Lehrmann and Justice Devine joined.
Justice Boyd filed a concurring opinion.
Chief Justice Hecht filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Guzman and Justice Brown joined.
Justice Guzman filed a dissenting opinion.
Justice Willett, joined by Justice Lehrmann and Justice Devine, concurring.
Frederick Douglass's irrepressible joy at exercising his hard-won freedom captures just how fundamental — and transformative — economic liberty is. Self-ownership, the right to put your mind and body to productive enterprise, is not a mere luxury to be enjoyed at the sufferance of governmental grace, but is indispensable to human dignity and prosperity.
Texans are doubly blessed, living under two constitutions sharing a singular purpose: to secure individual freedom, the essential condition of human flourishing. In today's age of staggering civic illiteracy — when 35 percent of Americans cannot correctly name a single branch of government — it is unsurprising that people mistake majority rule as America's defining value.
One of our constitutions (federal) is short, the other (state) is long — like really long — but both underscore liberty's primacy right away. The federal Constitution, in the first sentence of the Preamble, declares its mission to "secure the Blessings of Liberty."
This case concerns the timeless struggle between personal freedom and government power. Do Texans live under a presumption of liberty or a presumption of restraint? The Texas Constitution confers power — but even more critically, it constrains power. What are the outer-boundary limits on government actions that trample Texans' constitutional right to earn an honest living for themselves and their families? Some observers liken judges to baseball umpires, calling legal balls and strikes, but when it comes to restrictive licensing laws, just how generous is the constitutional strike zone? Must courts rubber-stamp even the most non-sensical encroachments on occupational freedom? Are the most patently farcical and protectionist restrictions nigh unchallengeable, or are there, in fact, judicially enforceable limits?
This case raises constitutional eyebrows because it asks building-block questions about constitutional architecture — about how we as Texans govern ourselves and about the relationship of the citizen to the State. This case concerns far more than whether Ashish Patel can pluck unwanted hair with a strand of thread. This case is fundamentally about the American Dream and the unalienable human right to pursue happiness without curtsying to government on bended knee. It is about whether government can connive with rent-seeking factions to ration liberty unrestrained, and whether judges must submissively uphold even the most risible encroachments.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that the right to pursue a lawful calling "free from unreasonable governmental interference" is guaranteed under the federal Constitution,
I recognize the potential benefits of licensing: protecting the public and preventing charlatanism. I also recognize the proven benefits of constitutional constraints: protecting the public and preventing collectivism. Invalidating irrational laws does not beckon a Dickensian world of run-amok frauds and pretenders. The Court's view is simple, and simply stated: Laws that impinge your constitutionally
By contrast, the dissents see government power in the economic realm as infinitely elastic, and thus limited government as entirely fictive, troubling since economic freedom is no less vulnerable to majoritarian oppression than, say, religious freedom — perhaps more so. Exalting the reflexive deference championed by Progressive theorists like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the dissents would seemingly uphold even the most facially protectionist actions. Stranger still, the principal dissent, while conceding that our state and federal Constitutions protect economic liberty, quotes liberally from Justice Holmes, who rejected that the Fourteenth Amendment does any such thing.
In any event, as Justice Holmes cruelly proved, dogmatic majoritarianism can exact a ruthless price. In Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether Carrie Buck, a Virginia teenager raped and impregnated by her foster parents' nephew, could be forcibly sterilized on grounds that she was "feeble minded."
Justice Holmes later boasted to a friend that "[it] gave me pleasure, establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles."
Like the Court, I favor a less hard-hearted and more liberty-minded view for Texas, one that sees the judiciary as James Madison did when he introduced the Bill of Rights, as an "impenetrable bulwark" against imperious government.
To be sure, the Capitol, not this Court, is the center of policymaking gravity, and judges are lousy second-guessers of the other branches' economic judgments. Lawmakers' policy-setting power is unrivaled — but it is not unlimited. Preeminence does not equal omnipotence. Politicians decide if laws pass, but courts decide if those laws pass muster. Cases stretching back centuries treat economic liberty as constitutionally protected — we crossed that Rubicon long ago — and there is a fateful difference between active judges who defend rights and activist judges who concoct rights. If judicial review means anything, it is that judicial restraint does not allow everything. The rational-basis bar may be low, but it is not subterranean.
I support the Court's "Don't Thread on Me" approach: Threaders with no license are less menacing than government with unlimited license.
This case lays bare a spirited debate raging in legal circles, one that conjures legal buzzwords and pejoratives galore: activism vs. restraint, deference vs. dereliction, adjudication vs. abdication. The rhetoric at times seems overheated, but the temperature reflects the stakes. It concerns the most elemental — if not elementary — question of American jurisprudence: the proper role of the judiciary under the Constitution.
Judicial duty requires courts to act judicially by adjudicating, not politically by legislating. So when is it proper for a court to strike down legislative or executive action as unconstitutional? There are people of goodwill on both sides, and as this case demonstrates, it seems a legal Rorschach test, where one person's "judicial engagement" is another person's "judicial
There are competing visions, to put it mildly, of the role judges should play in policing the other branches, particularly when reviewing economic regulations. On one side is the Progressive left, joined by some conservatives, who favor absolute judicial deference to majority rule. Judge Robert Bork falls into this camp. A conservative luminary, Bork is heir to a Progressive luminary, Justice Holmes, who also espoused judicial minimalism. Both men believed the foremost principle of American government was not individual liberty but majoritarianism.
The other side advocates "judicial engagement" whereby courts meaningfully enforce constitutional boundaries, lest judicial restraint become judicial surrender.
This much is clear: Spirited debates over judicial review have roiled America since the Founding, from Marbury v. Madison,
When it comes to regulating the economy, Holmesian deference still dominates, as seen in the Supreme Court's landmark 2012 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
The principal dissent claims "the rational basis standard invokes objective reason as its measure," a contention difficult to take seriously.
The test adopted today bears a passing resemblance to "rational basis"-type wording, but this test is rational basis with bite, demanding actual rationality, scrutinizing the law's actual basis, and applying an actual test.
Government understandably wants to rid society of quacks, swindlers, and incompetents. And licensing is one of government's preferred tools, aiming to protect us from harm by credentialing certain occupations and activities. You can't practice medicine in Texas without satisfying the Board of Medical Examiners. You can't zoom down SH-130 outside Austin at 85 miles per hour (reportedly the highest speed limit in the Western Hemisphere) without a driver's license. Sensible rules undoubtedly boost our quality of life. And senseless rules undoubtedly weaken our quality of life. Governments at every level — national, state, and local — wield regulatory power, but not always with regulatory prudence, which critics say stymies innovation, raises consumer prices,
It merits repeating: Judicial duty does not include second-guessing everyday policy choices, however improvident. The question for judges is not whether a law is sensible but whether it is constitutional. Does state "police power" — the inherent authority to enact general-welfare legislation — ever go too far? Does a Texas Constitution inclined to limited government have anything to say about government irrationally subjugating the livelihoods of Texans?
The Republic of Texas regulated just one profession: doctors.
Since World War II, however, the economy, both nationally and here in Texas, has undergone a profound shift. States now assert licensing authority over an ever-increasing range of occupations, particularly in the fast-growing service sector, which makes up "three-quarters of gross domestic product and most job growth in the U.S."
This spike in licensing coincides with a decline in labor-union membership. "In fact, [occupational licensing] has eclipsed unionization as the dominant organizing force of the U.S. labor market."
The Lone Star State is not immune from licensure proliferation. An ever-growing number of Texans must convince government of their fitness to ply their trade, spurring the House Committee on Government Efficiency and Reform in 2013 to lament the kudzu-like spread of licensure: "The proliferation of occupational licensing by the State of Texas can be to the detriment of the very consumer the licensing is professing to protect."
Unlike some states, Texas doesn't yet require florists,
The "sum of good government," Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural, was one "which shall restrain men from injuring one another" — indisputably true — but "shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvements."
The Texas Constitution has something to say when barriers to occupational freedom are absurd or have less to do with fencing out incompetents than with fencing in incumbents. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman observed, "the justification" for licensing is always to protect the public, but "the reason" for licensing is shown by observing who pushes for it — usually those representing not consumers but vested, already-licensed practitioners.
Indeed, some fret that the focus of occupational regulation has morphed from protecting the public from unqualified providers to protecting practitioners from unwanted competition. Courts are increasingly asking whether societal benefits are being subordinated to the financial benefits of those lucky enough to be licensed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently buried the so-called "casket cartel" in Louisiana, siding 3-0 with a group of woodworking Benedictine monks who supported their monastery by selling handcrafted pine coffins. State-licensed funeral directors found the competition unwelcome, and the monks were threatened with a fine and jail time for breaching Louisiana law that said only state-licensed funeral directors could sell "funeral merchandise." In striking down the anticompetitive law, the Fifth Circuit explained: "The great deference due state economic regulation does not demand judicial blindness to the history of a challenged rule or to the context of its adoption nor does it require courts to accept nonsensical explanations for regulation."
A similar casket-cartel law was invalidated in 2002 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the first federal appellate court since the New Deal to invalidate an economic regulation for offending economic liberties secured by the Fourteenth Amendment.
More and more, courts — even comedians
Tellingly, the state declined to appeal, saying it would instead launch "a comprehensive review of the barber and cosmetology statutes" and "work with [the] legislative oversight committees on proposals to remove unnecessary regulatory burdens for Texas businesses and entrepreneurs."
The U.S. Supreme Court itself recently examined how states regulate professions, scrutinizing whether licensing boards dominated by industry incumbents are rightly focused on weeding out scammers and inept practitioners or wrongly focused on weeding out newcomers.
As today's case shows, the Texas occupational licensure regime, predominantly impeding Texans of modest means, can seem a hodge-podge of disjointed, logic-defying irrationalities, where the burdens imposed seem almost farcical, forcing many lower-income Texans to face a choice: submit to illogical bureaucracy or operate an illegal business? Licensure absurdities become apparent when you compare the wildly disparate education/experience burdens visited on various professions. The disconnect between the strictness of some licensing rules and their alleged public-welfare rationale is patently bizarre:
State licensing impacts our lives from head to toe. Literally. Starting at the
At the other bodily extreme, what's the demarcation between the foot (which podiatrists can treat) and the ankle (which they can't)? These are high-stakes disputes, and sometimes the licensing bodies have jurisdictional spats with each other, usually over "scope of practice" issues. So where does the foot end and the ankle begin? In 2010, this Court ended a nearly ten-year legal battle between, in one corner, the Texas Medical Association and Texas Orthopedic Association, and in the other, the Texas State Board of Podiatric Medical Examiners and Texas Podiatric Medical Association.
According to the academic literature, the real-world effects of steroidal regulation are everywhere: increased consumer cost; decreased consumer choice; increased practitioner income; decreased practitioner mobility
Anyone acquainted with human nature understands, as Madison did, that when people, or branches of government, are free to judge their own actions, nothing is prohibited. The Court recognizes that Texans possess a basic liberty under Article I, Section 19 to earn a living. And to safeguard that guarantee, the Court adopts a test allergic to nonsensical government encroachment. I prefer authentic judicial scrutiny to a rubber-stamp exercise that stacks the legal deck in government's favor.
My views are simply stated:
Even under the lenient rational-basis test — "the most deferential of the standards of review"
It is instructive to consider the U.S. Supreme Court's first occupational licensing case, from 1889. In Dent v. West Virginia
The federal rational-basis requirement debuted amid Depression-era upheaval in 1934, when the Court in Nebbia v. New York,
Indeed, federal-style scrutiny is quite unscrutinizing, with many burdens acing the rational-basis test while flunking the straight-face test. As the U.S. Supreme Court held almost 80 years ago in United States v. Carolene Products,
The dissents would subordinate concrete scrutiny to conjectural scrutiny that grants a nigh-irrebuttable presumption of constitutionality. It is elastic review where any conceivable, theoretical, imaginary justification suffices. In my view, Texas judges should instead conduct a genuine search for truth — as they do routinely in countless other constitutional areas — asking "What is government actually up to?" When constitutional rights are imperiled, Texans deserve actual scrutiny of actual assertions with actual evidence.
Texas judges should discern whether government is seeking a constitutionally valid end using constitutionally permissible means. And they should do so based on real-world facts and without helping government invent after-the-fact rationalizations. I believe the Texas Constitution requires an earnest search for truth, not the turn-a-blind-eye approach that prevails under the federal Constitution.
The jurisprudential fact of the matter is that courts are more protective of some constitutional guarantees than others. One bedrock feature of 20th-century jurisprudence, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court's New Deal-era decisions, was to relegate economic rights to a more junior-varsity echelon of constitutional protection than "fundamental" rights. Nothing in the federal or Texas Constitutions requires treating certain rights as "fundamental" and devaluing others as "non-fundamental" and applying different levels of judicial scrutiny, but it is what it is: Economic liberty gets less constitutional protection than other constitutional rights.
This is not opinion but irrefutable, demonstrable fact. Ever since what is universally known as "the most famous footnote in constitutional law"
For example, when courts decide an Establishment Clause challenge under the First Amendment, they normally defer to a State's asserted secular purpose. But such deference is not blind. Courts don't simply take government's word for it; they are careful to ensure that a "statement of such purpose be sincere and not a sham."
Digital privacy under the Fourth Amendment is another constitutional area
Some constitutional rights fall somewhere in between, like "commercial speech," not because the Constitution draws that distinction but because judges do. Commercial speech — advertisements and other business-related speech — is a hybrid under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, involving speech rights (protected vigorously) and economic rights (protected not so vigorously).
Kelo is indeed illustrative, as the rational-basis test applies in eminent-domain cases, too, notwithstanding the assurance in footnote four of Carolene Products that alleged violations of the Bill of Rights deserve heightened scrutiny. Even though the Fifth Amendment explicitly protects property, the U.S. Supreme Court has supplanted the Carolene Products bifurcation with rational-basis deference in takings cases. The Kelo Court stressed its "longstanding policy of deference to legislative judgments,"
A few years later in District of Columbia v. Heller,
Today's decision recognizes another key contributor to the irrationalities afflicting occupational licensing: the hard-wired inclination to reduce competition. This metabolic impulse — Human Nature 101 — has always existed.
English courts protected the right to earn a living since the early Seventeenth Century, long before the U.S. Constitution was adopted. In 1614, the Court of King's Bench invalidated a law that required an apprenticeship with the local guild before someone could become an upholsterer, dismissing the cries of licensed upholsterers who warned of inexpert practitioners. Lord Chief Justice Coke, Britain's highest judicial officer, was unpersuaded, holding "no skill" was required, "for [someone] may well learn this in seven hours."
Adam Smith echoed Coke a century and a half later in The Wealth of Nations, calling efforts to thwart people from exercising their dexterity and industry as they wish "a plain violation of this most sacred property."
What is past is indeed prologue.
A raft of modern research by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker and various social scientists confirms that practitioners desire to stifle would-be competitors.
The Legislature responded by passing House Bill 86, which creates a mechanism to critically examine whether existing occupational regulations are still needed, and
Courts need not be oblivious to the iron political and economic truth that the regulatory environment is littered with rent-seeking by special-interest factions who crave the exclusive, state-protected right to pursue their careers. Again, smart regulations are indispensable, but nonsensical regulations inflict multiple burdens — on consumers (who pay more for goods and services, or try to do the work themselves),
The Founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to birth a new
Madison, lead architect of the U.S. Constitution, saw his bedrock constitutional mission as ensuring that America does not "convert a limited into an unlimited Govt."
As mentioned earlier, the term "judicial activism" is a legal Rorschach test. I oppose judicial activism, inventing rights not rooted in the law. But the opposite extreme, judicial passivism, is corrosive, too — judges who, while not activist, are not active in preserving the liberties, and the limits, our Framers actually enshrined. The Texas Constitution is irrefutably framed in proscription, imposing unsubtle and unmistakable limits on government power. It models the federal Constitution in a fundamental way: dividing government power so that each branch checks and balances the others. But as we recently observed, "the Texas Constitution takes Madison a step further by including, unlike the federal Constitution, an explicit Separation of Powers provision to curb overreaching and to spur rival branches to guard their prerogatives."
The power to "protect the public" is a heady and fearsome one.
Our Framers understood that government was inclined to advance its own interests, even to the point of ham-fisted bullying, which is precisely why the Constitution was written — to keep government on a leash, not We the People. But individual liberty pays the price when our ingenious system of checks and balances sputters, including when the judiciary subordinates liberty to the congeries of group interests that dictate majoritarian outcomes. Daily and undeniably, there exist government incursions that siphon what Thomas Jefferson called our "due degree of liberty"
Police power is undoubtedly an attribute of state sovereignty, but sovereignty ultimately resides in "the people of the State of Texas."
Before solving a problem, you must first define it. The Lone Star State boasts a spirit of daring and rugged independence, virtues essential to personal and economic
Government's conception of its own power as limitless is hard-wired. But under the Texas Constitution, government may only pursue constitutionally permissible ends. Naked economic protectionism, strangling hopes and dreams with bureaucratic red tape, is not one of them. And such barriers, often stemming from interest-group politics, are often insurmountable for Texans on the lower rungs of the economic ladder (who unsurprisingly lack political power) — not to mention the harm inflicted on consumers deprived of the fruits of industrious entrepreneurs. Irrational licensing laws oppress hard-working Texans of modest means, men and women struggling to do what Texans of all generations have done: to better their families through honest enterprise.
Governments are "instituted among Men" to "secure" preexisting, "unalienable Rights."
Economic liberty is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition,"
I believe judicial passivity is incompatible with individual liberty and constitutionally limited government. Occupational freedom, the right to earn a living as one chooses, is a nontrivial constitutional right entitled to nontrivial judicial protection. People are owed liberty by virtue of their very humanity — "endowed by their Creator," as the Declaration affirms.
The Founders understood that a "limited Constitution" can be preserved "no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing."
The Court today rejects servility in the economic-liberty realm, fortifying protections for Texans seeking what Texans have always sought: a better life for themselves and their families. There remains, as Davy Crockett excitedly wrote his children, "a world of country to settle."
Justice Boyd, concurring in judgment.
I concur in the Court's judgment but do not fully agree with its reasoning. Specifically, I do not agree with the Court's
The Texas Constitution provides that "[n]o citizen of this State shall be deprived of life, liberty, property, privileges or immunities, or in any manner disfranchised, except by the due course of the law of the land." TEX. CONST. art. I, § 19. Under our precedent, this guarantee "contains both a procedural component and a substantive component." Barshop v. Medina Cnty. Underground Water Conservation Dist., 925 S.W.2d 618, 632 (Tex.1996). The issue here is whether requiring the petitioners to obtain an esthetician's license as a condition for practicing their trade of eyebrow threading violates their substantive rights to liberty, property, privileges, or immunities without due course of law.
As the Court notes, this Court has "not been entirely consistent" in its articulation of the standard by which we review the constitutionality of economic regulations under the due course of law provision. Ante at 80. Through the years, for example, we have variously said that laws are presumed to be constitutional and a law is invalid only if:
These precedents illustrate the difficulty the Court has had articulating the appropriate standard. I would read our prior descriptions together, to provide that a law violates the substantive due course of law provision only if it is arbitrary and unreasonable, and therefore oppressive, because it has no rational relationship to a legitimate government interest. The Court, by contrast, holds that a law is invalid if its "purpose could not arguably be rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest" or "when considered as a whole, [its]
I agree that the Court's new burdensome/oppressive standard is "loose" — too "loose," in fact, to be useful in our analysis of these types of constitutional challenges. See post at 135 (Hecht, C.J., dissenting). Determining what "burdensome" or "oppressive" means in this context will be nigh impossible, unless we use those terms, as we have in our prior opinions, to refer to the burdens that result from a law that is not rationally related to a legitimate government interest. Like JUSTICE GUZMAN, "I have significant doubts that this standard is workable in practice." Post at 142. And like both dissenting Justices, I believe the burdensome/oppressive standard makes it too easy for courts to invalidate regulations for their own personal policy reasons. See post at 135 (Hecht, C.J., dissenting); post at 141 (Guzman, J., dissenting). Because, as JUSTICE GUZMAN notes, courts cannot and should not "legislate from the bench," post at 140, the bar should be set very high, to ensure that it is indeed the Constitution, and not merely a court, that invalidates a law.
But the bar cannot be insurmountable, and if the application of any regulatory licensing scheme were ever constitutionally invalid, this one is. I need not repeat my colleagues' descriptions, because everyone (including the State and both dissenting Justices) agrees that requiring eyebrow threaders to complete the current requirements necessary to obtain an esthetician's license "is obviously too much." Post at 131 (Hecht, C.J., dissenting); post at 142-43 (Guzman, J., dissenting). Certainly, "[i]f there is room for a fair difference of opinion as to the necessity and reasonableness of a legislative enactment on a subject which lies within the domain of the police power, the courts will not hold it void." State v. Richards, 301 S.W.2d 597, 602 (1957). But there is no difference of opinion here: requiring eyebrow threaders to obtain an esthetician's license is neither necessary nor reasonable. Requiring them to obtain training in sanitation and safety is rational, but requiring them to get an esthetician's license is not.
The CHIEF JUSTICE suggests that "there is ... evidence from which the Legislature could reasonably conclude that the required instruction and testing would further its goal of protecting public health and safety through the regulation of cosmetology." Post at 140. I agree that protecting public health and safety is a legitimate government interest, but I do not agree that requiring eyebrow threaders to meet the current requirements for obtaining an esthetician's license is rationally related to achieving that interest. Under the dissenting Justices' approach, if the Legislature decided to require eyebrow threaders to obtain a medical license, we would have to uphold that decision because that licensing scheme also "instruct[s] in general sanitation and safety practices." Post at 140 (Hecht, C.J., dissenting).
I therefore concur in the judgment.
Chief Justice Hecht, joined by Justice Guzman and Justice Brown, dissenting.
This is one of those cases in which, once the Court has decided whom it wants to win, the less said the better. Result is an inapt tool for shaping principle; it's supposed to work the other way around. And when principle ends up being mutilated, it can no longer be used to guide other results. Since it turns out that the Court thinks substantive due process means whatever judges say it means, it would be best to leave bad enough alone rather than pretend the idea has any support in the Constitution's text or history. The Court runs the risk that what passes for constitutional analysis around here will be seen as just picking words out of the air.
The Threaders deserve to have the yoke of the regulatory state thrown off, the shackles on their free enterprise shattered, in short — although brevity is not the hallmark of some of today's writings — to stick it to the man. And what better way to do all that than by having judges hold the State's 80-year-old cosmetology licensing scheme, also found in ten other states, unconstitutional as applied to eyebrow threading. The trouble is, this Court, like the United States Supreme Court, has repeatedly held that a statute with a rational basis does not violate substantive due process, and applying that standard here will not help the Threaders. Casting about, the Court comes up with "oppressive", a brand-new entrant in the substantive due process lexicon. Neither this Court nor any other the Court can find has ever used "oppressive" as a test for substantive due process. Which is great because the Court is now free — as free as the grateful Threaders from public health and safety regulation — to make up substantive due process from scratch.
Whether eyebrow threaders need 750 hours' training, or only 430, or 40, or 1, to practice their trade on the public is not for us to say, as long as the Legislature, whose job it is to say, is making a rational effort to protect public health and safety. As the Court acknowledges at one point, "it is not for courts to second-guess [legislative and agency] decisions as to the necessity for and the extent of training that should be required for different types of commercial service providers."
Because the final authority to interpret and apply the Constitution belongs to the Judiciary, only the people themselves, by constitutional amendment, can alter the Court's substantive due process decisions. The Judiciary's authority is enormous and not lightly to be exercised. Justice Powell once observed that "[t]he history of substantive
The Court, and JUSTICE WILLETT'S concurring opinion in its wild championing of economic liberty, seem oblivious to the reality that social liberty is no less important. The same substantive due process that can free eyebrow threaders from onerous training requirements can also be used to establish a right of privacy not otherwise to be found in the Constitution.
I respectfully dissent.
The Legislature has regulated cosmetic services for 80 years. The original impetus was concern for public health and safety. "[T]he public," the Legislature found in the Cosmetology Act of 1935, "is daily exposed to disease due to insufficient care as to sanitation and hygiene [and should be protected by the Act] from inexperienced and unscrupulous beauty parlors and beauty culture schools".
In 1971, the Legislature rewrote the Act. An expanded definition of cosmetology specifically included "removing superfluous hair from the body by use of depilatories
The Department requires an esthetician specialty license for threading.
Depending on the school, the training can take from nine to sixteen months and cost anywhere from $3,500 for a public junior college to $22,000 for a private school. Threading is not a required part of the curriculum, which generally covers "superfluous hair removal", and only a handful of schools offer instruction in threading. Health, safety, and sanitation issues are covered as part of the first five subjects listed above; these subjects account for 430 of the prerequisite hours.
An applicant must also pass a written and a practical examination.
Cosmetology regulations require eyebrow threaders, like other cosmetologists, to wash their hands or use a liquid hand sanitizer before performing any services on a customer; dispose of all single-use items that have come in contact with the client's skin; store thread in sealed bags or covered containers and in a clean, dry, and debris-free storage area; and clean, disinfect, and sterilize or sanitize all multi-use items prior to each service.
The Threaders acknowledge that threading poses health risks. In the trial court, they offered evidence from a physician, Dr. Patel (no relation to Petitioner Ashish Patel), that removing a hair from its follicle opens a portal through which bacteria or a virus can permeate the skin. Dr. Patel opined that threading may lead to "redness, swelling, itching, inflammation of the hair follicles, discoloration, and ... superficial bacterial and viral infections." She testified that threading could cause the spread of infections such as flat warts, skin-colored lesions known as molluscum contagiosum, pink eye, ringworm, impetigo, and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (often called a "staph infection"). She opined that a threader's failure to use appropriate sanitation practices — such as using disposable materials properly, cleaning the work station, using effective hand-washing techniques, and correctly treating skin irritations and abrasions — can expose threading clients to infection and disease. She also testified that these health risks can be fully addressed by giving threaders one hour's training in sanitation and hygiene.
The Threaders allege that, as applied to them, the cosmetology licensing scheme violates substantive due process — that is, that it deprives them of economic liberty without due course of law in violation of Article I, Section 19 of the Texas Constitution. The Threaders assert that Texas' regulation of cosmetology "places senseless burdens on eyebrow threaders and threading businesses without any actual benefit to public health and safety." But the Threaders acknowledge that Texas' longstanding regulation of cosmetology, including superfluous hair removal, is needed to protect the public health. They argue only that it is excessive.
On our record, Texas' regulation of threading seems excessive and misguided as a matter of policy, though I hasten to add, nothing of what prompted the regulation is before us. We have conducted no investigations and held no hearings. As in any case, we know what the parties have told us, and nothing more. This distinguishes the Judiciary from the Legislature. We are ill-equipped to set policy because we have no way of summoning the various interests for input or exploring all considerations. But on this record, threading regulation is obviously too much.
Is it also unconstitutional? Federal and Texas constitutional protections of due process are closely related. The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted by Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states two years later, provides that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".
This Court has recognized that Texas' due course of law guarantee protects both procedural and substantive rights.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, warning:
Subsequent cases proved true Holmes' warning that a mere reasonableness standard for substantive due process was unworkable and that judges cannot practically or legally constitutionalize economic theory.
This requirement that economic regulation need only bear a rational relationship to a legitimate state interest is far more deferential to state legislatures than Lochner's reasonableness test. Later reflecting on the passing of the Lochner era, Justice Douglas wrote for the Supreme Court:
The United States Constitution does not, of course, prohibit the states from experimenting with substantive due process based in their own constitutions,
But, in the decades since the federal courts adopted the rational basis test, we have not wandered far from that standard. Even in State v. Richards — the case relied on principally by the Threaders to support heightened scrutiny of economic regulation — the Court's reasoning and result were deferential to the legislation at issue. We concluded that a provision authorizing forfeiture of a vehicle that had been used in furtherance of a crime without the owner's knowledge did not contravene the Texas Constitution.
Though we did not refer to the federal rational basis test, our analysis was consistent with it.
For the past 20 years, we have consistently adhered to the rational basis test. In Barshop v. Medina County Underground Water Conservation District, we upheld water regulations against a substantive due process challenge as "rationally related to legitimate state purposes in managing and regulating this vital resource."
Under our precedent, a clearly arbitrary and unreasonable regulation is one that has no rational relationship to its purpose in furthering a legitimate state interest.
While substantive due process has been the subject of many cases and much study since Lochner, the Court cannot find a Texas case, a case from an American jurisdiction, or a scholarly treatise or article to cite in support of its "oppressive" test.
The Court's answer is that a rational basis standard is no better because if, as in the present case, the State could rationally require some training, the State could require an unlimited amount of training.
As long as judicial policy is made in the name of substantive due process, the Court argues, it is judging, not legislating.
That the Court has gone where no one has gone before is proudly declared by JUSTICE WILLETT'S concurring opinion. Gone are the constraints of the rational basis standard, a standard dismissed as a "rubber stamp" and a "judicial shrug". JUSTICE WILLETT'S rhetorical torrent against economic regulation carries along its ultimate demand: Texas judges must conduct an investigation "asking" what the "government [is] actually up to", weighing "what policymakers really had in mind at the time," "scrutin[izing]" "actual assertions with actual evidence."
I agree with JUSTICE WILLETT about one thing: "[t]his case concerns far more than whether Ashish Patel can pluck unwanted hair with a strand of thread."
Hair stylists could make the same argument the Threaders do: why should they be required to have instruction and examination in facial treatment, manicuring, massage, and the removal of unwanted hair? Whether to create various licensing classification schemes, and which practices to include within each, have been questions central to cosmetology regulation since 1971. It is the kind of line-drawing that the Legislature and the Department, not courts, are equipped to do. More importantly, the Constitution gives this line-drawing power — this policymaking — to the Legislature and the Executive, not to the Judiciary.
The same issue applies to other occupational regulation. There is an ongoing debate regarding whether law school should have a third year, whether students should be allowed to sit for the bar exam earlier, and whether a lawyer should be allowed to obtain a special, limited-practice license with less instruction. Further, students intent on pursuing a particular area of practice — tax law, for example — question why they should be required to take other courses, including those, like civil procedure, thought to be part of a fundamental first-year curriculum. Medical education is similarly questioned. Why should students intent on confining their practice to particular areas or specialities be required to take unrelated courses? The answer is often that subjects unrelated to a particular
And while Lochner justified judicial invalidation of economic regulation in the name of substantive due process to protect a liberty interest grounded in an implied constitutional right to contract, liberty is not solely, not even primarily, an economic concept. Other constitutional rights have been found by implication in our constitutions.
I would apply the test established by our precedent: regulation is unconstitutional only if it lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate government interest.
The Threaders do not dispute that, in general, Texas' long-standing regulation of cosmetology is rationally related to the State's legitimate interest in protecting public health and safety.
The health risks of commercial hair removal cannot be minimized. Dr. Patel, the expert offered by the Threaders in the trial court, testified that avulsive hair removal opens a portal through which bacteria can enter the body through the skin. For this reason, she explained, she trains threaders in her medical spa to use an antiseptic on the eyebrow area before beginning the threading process and to apply
Applicants for a general cosmetology license or an esthetician speciality license are instructed in general sanitation and safety practices, and each of the specific procedures they learn incorporates the hygiene and safety practices pertinent to that procedure. If they attend a school that teaches threading, they learn to apply these concepts specifically to that practice, and if instead they attend a school that does not instruct in threading, they nevertheless learn these safety implications and requirements as applied to other avulsive forms of hair removal. Moreover, although there is evidence that only a few cosmetology schools currently teach threading, the Legislature could reasonably have concluded that more schools will teach it as demand for the procedure grows. Although there is evidence that no more than an hour of sanitation training is necessary for threading, there is other evidence from which the Legislature could reasonably conclude that the required instruction and testing would further its goal of protecting public health and safety through the regulation of cosmetology.
Texas' cosmetology regulation as applied to threading is, to quote Justice Holmes, "injudicious", though I would not go so far as to say "tyrannical", and certainly not clearly arbitrary. I would hold that the regulation is rationally related to the State's legitimate interest in protecting the health and safety of the public.
The Court pooh-poohs the Lochnerian "monster". A word of caution: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I would affirm the judgment of the court of appeals. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
Justice Guzman, dissenting.
This Court has long maintained that it does not legislate from the bench. Today, it does just that. Worse yet, it does so in the context of revivifying substantive due process, one of the most volatile doctrines in constitutional history.
The Court's opinion ably sets out the facts, and describes the somewhat byzantine web of regulations that apply to cosmetologists, a class that includes eyebrow threaders like the petitioners ("Threaders"). To legally practice cosmetology in Texas, a license is required. TEX. OCC. CODE §§ 1602.251(a), .257. A general operator license requires training a minimum of 1,500 hours, whereas an esthetician specialty license requires a minimum of 750 hours.
The record shows that of the 750 hours required for an esthetician license, 40 hours are devoted to sanitation. Sanitation and hygiene issues are also intermittently addressed elsewhere during training, albeit in the context of instruction on other subjects. The fact that health and safety instruction comprises at least part of the required instruction is no small matter, given that the Threaders' own expert observed that improper threading procedures can contribute to the spread of highly contagious bacterial and viral infections, including flat warts, skin-colored lesions known as mulluscum contagiosum, pink eye, ringworm, impetigo, staphylococcus aureus, and other similarly unpleasant maladies.
The central dispute concerns the training requirements, specifically the amount of time they necessarily require. The Threaders contend that as many as 710 of the 750 training hours for an esthetician license are unnecessary, given that they concern procedures unrelated to threading. The State disputes that math, but even its estimate concedes that as many as 320 of the curriculum hours are unrelated to health and safety issues engendered by eyebrow threading. In the Threaders' view, the licensure courses require too much time and feature too much irrelevant material, and by mandating them for eyebrow threading, the State of Texas violates the guarantee of the Texas Constitution that "[n]o citizen of this State shall be deprived of ... liberty ... except by the due course of the law of the land." TEX. CONST. art. I, § 19.
The Court propounds a novel test in resolving this core dispute. The second prong of this test holds that an as-applied challenge to an economic regulation statute under section 19's substantive-due-course-of-law requirement will fail to overcome the presumption that the statute is constitutional, unless the challenging party demonstrates that the statute's "actual, real-world effect as applied to the challenging party could not arguably be rationally related to, or is so burdensome as to be oppressive in light of, the governmental interest." Op. at 87. Relying on this element of the test, the Court estimates that approximately 42 percent of the minimum required training hours are "arguably" not relevant to the actual work performed by eyebrow threaders. Id. at 89-90. While this is not "determinative" of the constitutional question, the Court says that "the percentage must also be considered along with other factors, such as the quantitative aspect of the hours represented by that percentage and the costs associated with them." Id.
The Court agrees with the Threaders' characterization of the regulation as arbitrary, but alas, that same adjective could be applied to the line-drawing necessarily involved here and in future cases. Is 750 hours too much to require for threading? From the Threaders' perspective, perhaps. But from the vantage of someone injured by these procedures, perhaps not. Some threading techniques reportedly rely on placing one end of the string in the threader's mouth, which would seem to invite a host of bacterial infections (superficial folliculitis, for instance). Different skin sensitivities could be placed at different risks by these procedures. The crucial point is that these considerations, and their relation to training programs, are quintessential legislative inquiries. Thus, I agree with the Court when it admits: "Differentiating between types of cosmetology practices is the prerogative of the Legislature and regulatory agencies to which the Legislature properly delegates authority," and likewise with the statement that "it is not for courts to second-guess their decisions as to the necessity for and the extent of training that should be required for different types of commercial service providers." Id. at 89. In my view, the plain truth of these statements suggests a contrary approach.
This case involves first principles, and timeless precepts bear repeating. By design, our system of government rests on checks and balances and separation of powers. The genius of the Founders lay in their prescience. Frankly acknowledging human frailty, they designed a system of government that apportions power among the three branches, allowing a proper balance of interests and ambitions. In order for this equipoise to persist, however, denizens of government's separate branches must properly conceive of their relative roles. For the judiciary, as with the other branches, this means recognizing the limits on its own authority. This is no easy matter, given that human nature tilts to the arrogation of power; as Justice Antonin Scalia once waggishly noted, this enduring trait is why Lord Acton never uttered "`[p]ower tends to purify.'" Planned Parenthood of Se. Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 981, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
Were I a member of the Legislature, there is little question that I would look to
I doubt the 3-0 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Judge Sparks of the Western District of Texas believed they were unleashing any monsters, or, scarier still, legislating from the bench! — when they recently struck down state economic regulations on rational-basis grounds. See St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille, 712 F.3d 215 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 134 S.Ct. 423, 187 L.Ed.2d 281 (2013) (invalidating the Louisiana "casket cartel"); Brantley v. Kuntz, No. A-13-CA-872-SS, ___ F.Supp.3d ___, 2015 WL 75244 (W.D.Tex. Jan. 5, 2015) (invalidating Texas barber-school regulations as applied to African hair braiding). Indeed, the Fifth Circuit in the casket cartel case dismissed the tired Lochner charge head-on, denying that the "ghost of Lochner [was] lurking about." St. Joseph Abbey, 712 F.3d at 227.
When the Court in Slaughter-House upheld 5-4 the Louisiana monopoly law, it stressed that the Privileges or Immunities Clause only protected rights guaranteed by the United States and did not restrict state police power. What's the consensus view today of Slaughter-House? "Virtually no serious modern scholar — left, right, or center — thinks [that Slaughter-House] is a plausible reading of the [Fourteenth] Amendment." Akhil R. Amar, Foreword: The Document and the Doctrine, 114 HARV. L. REV. 26, 123 n.327 (2000).
The important point for today's case is that Slaughter-House, while holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause offered no protection for individual rights against state officials, underscored that states themselves possess power to protect their citizens' privileges or immunities, including the right to pursue an honest living against illegitimate state intrusion. As the Court correctly notes, the drafters of the Texas Constitution were doubtless aware of this reservation of power to the states when they passed our own Privileges or Immunities Clause just two years later in 1875. One question lurking in today's case was whether this Court would do to our Privileges or Immunities Clause what the U.S. Supreme Court did to the federal clause — nullify it by judicial fiat.
A quick word on Lochner. While the vote was 5-4, eight of nine Justices (all but Justice Holmes) agreed that the Constitution protects economic liberty. And Lochner was not the first Supreme Court case to say so. That happened eight years earlier in Allgeyer v. Louisiana, which defined "liberty" in the Fourteenth Amendment to include the freedom "to pursue any livelihood or avocation; and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned." 165 U.S. 578, 589, 17 S.Ct. 427, 41 L.Ed. 832 (1897). As Justice Harlan acknowledged in the principal Lochner dissent, "there is a liberty of contract which cannot be violated even under the sanction of direct legislative enactment." 198 U.S. at 68, 25 S.Ct. 539 (Harlan, J., dissenting). Government may not "unduly interfere with the right of the citizen to enter into contracts" or to "earn his livelihood by any lawful calling, to pursue any livelihood or avocation." Id. at 65, 25 S.Ct. 539.
Historical note: This is the first Justice Harlan, The Great Dissenter, not his grandson who served on the Court in the mid-20th century. The first Justice Harlan, a strong proponent of natural rights, famously dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 552, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting), overruled by Brown v. Bd. of Ed., 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954), and also in the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 33, 3 S.Ct. 18, 27 L.Ed. 835 (1883) (Harlan, J., dissenting), that struck down federal antidiscrimination laws. Some scholars believe that Justice Harlan's dissent in Lochner had initially garnered a five-vote majority, but someone switched his vote.
While Justice Harlan's dissent, unlike Justice Holmes's dissent, believed economic liberty was constitutionally enshrined, he understood that states have a valid police-power interest in advancing public welfare. Id. ("liberty of contract is subject to such regulations as the state may reasonably prescribe for the common good and the well-being of society"). A law should be struck down only if there is "no real or substantial relation between the means employed by the state and the end sought to be accomplished by its legislation." Id. at 69, 25 S.Ct. 539. Justice Harlan would have upheld the New York maximum-hours law, but he stressed the presumption of constitutionality can be rebutted by evidence showing the restriction was arbitrary, unreasonable, or discriminatory. He simply found the government's health-and-safety justification plausible.
Importantly, there was no disagreement — none — between the Lochner majority and Justice Harlan's dissent over whether courts can legitimately scrutinize economic regulations. Nobody seriously disputes a state's omnibus power to safeguard its citizens' health and safety via economic regulation. Of course states have broad, inherent police power to enact general-welfare laws. Indeed, a few months after Lochner, the Court reaffirmed states' "firmly established" authority "to prescribe such regulations as may be reasonable, necessary and appropriate" to advance "the general comfort, health, and general prosperity of the state." Cal. Reduction Co. v. Sanitary Reduction Workers, 199 U.S. 306, 318, 26 S.Ct. 100, 50 L.Ed. 204 (1905). And just three years later, the Court upheld a maximum hours law for women. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412, 28 S.Ct. 324, 52 L.Ed. 551 (1908). In fact, the Lochner-era Court upheld many more economic regulations than it overturned. Thomas Colby & Peter J. Smith, The Return of Lochner, 100 CORNELL L. REV. 527, 539-40 (2015). The disagreement in Lochner was over who bears the burden — the government to prove legitimacy, or the challenger to prove illegitimacy. Justice Harlan believed the latter: "when the validity of a statute is questioned, the burden of proof ... is upon those who assert it to be unconstitutional." Lochner, 198 U.S. at 68, 25 S.Ct. 539 (citations omitted) (Harlan, J., dissenting). The Court today agrees, adopting an approach some might say tracks the principal Lochner dissent more than the Lochner majority.
The core question is one of constitutional limitation. Should judges blindly accept government's health-and-safety rationale, or instead probe more deeply to ensure the aim is not suppressing competition to benefit entrenched interests? A century and a half of pre-Lochner precedent allowed for judicial scrutiny of laws to ensure the laws actually intend to serve the public rather than a narrow faction. See generally HOWARD GILLMAN, THE CONSTITUTION BESIEGED: THE RISE AND DEMISE OF LOCHNER ERA POLICE POWERS JURISPRUDENCE (1993) (discussing the origins of Lochner-era jurisprudence). Lochner focused on a narrow issue: whether the maximum-hours law was truly intended to serve the general welfare or "other motives," namely to advantage the bakers' union and unionized bakeries over small, non-union bakeries, many of which employed disfavored immigrants.
Interestingly, some of the Texas commentary immediately following Lochner was quite favorable, including in the Dallas Morning News, which wrote "The right of contract is one of the most sacred rights of the freeman, and any interference with such privilege by Legislatures or courts is essentially dangerous and vicious." In Which the Right of Contract is Upheld, DALLAS MORNING NEWS, Apr. 20, 1905, at 6.
A wealth of contemporary legal scholarship is reexamining Lochner, its history and correctness as a matter of constitutional law, and its place within broader originalist thought, specifically judicial protection of unenumerated rights such as economic liberty. See supra note 24. Long story short: Legal orthodoxy about Lochner is evolving among many leading constitutional theorists. See, e.g., Colby & Smith, supra at 527; DAVID E. BERNSTEIN, REHABILITATING LOCHNER — DEFENDING INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AGAINST PROGRESSIVE REFORM (2011).
Aaron Edlin & Rebecca Haw, Cartels by Another Name: Should Licensed Occupations Face Antitrust Scrutiny?, 162 U. PA. L. REV. 1093, 1112 (2014) (footnotes and citations omitted).
One such xenophobic law targeted Chinese launderers, who dominated San Francisco's laundry market. The U.S. Supreme Court said no. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Court rejected efforts to persecute disfavored interests through arbitrary permitting laws. 118 U.S. 356, 6 S.Ct. 1064, 30 L.Ed. 220 (1886) (striking down San Francisco's laundry-permitting ordinance, which, while couched in public-safety rhetoric, plainly aimed to eliminate competition from Chinese operators). The Court minced no words: "the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living ... at the mere will of another seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself." Id. at 370, 6 S.Ct. 1064.
As explained above, the U.S. Supreme Court's nullification of the federal Privileges or Immunities Clause in Slaughter-House began the process of undermining the amendment's civil-rights protections for black Americans in the South. See, e.g., United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 23 L.Ed. 588 (1875); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S.Ct. 1138, 41 L.Ed. 256 (1896) overruled by Brown v. Bd. of Ed., 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954). Slaughter-House has been accused of "strangling the privileges or immunities clause in its crib." Akhil R. Amar, The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, 101 YALE L.J. 1193, 1259 (1992). Worse, it emboldened legislatures to enact notorious Jim Crow laws. Scholars across the political spectrum agree that Slaughter-House reflects a deeply flawed understanding of constitutional history.
Today, although there is hardly a distinction between most barber and cosmetology services, there is plenty of opportunity for overzealous regulators to tag unsuspecting shop owners with "gotcha" fines. See, e.g., Tex. Dep't of Licensing & Regulation v. Roosters MGC, LLC, No. 03-09-00253-CV, 2010 WL 2354064 (Tex.App.-Austin June 10, 2010, no pet.) (discussing whether a cosmetologist's use of a safety razor to remove hair from a customer's neck or face violates state law controlling what services can be provided exclusively by barbers).
Before 1935, a statute required registration, but not licensing, of "beauty parlor" owners and operators, imposed certain health and cleanliness requirements, and set fines for statutory violations. See Act of 1921, 37th Leg., R.S., ch. 79, 1921 Tex. Gen. Laws 155, 155-158, codified in TEX. GEN. CODE arts. 728-733 (Vernon's 1925).
