Experienced Teacher Doesn’t Need The Government To Approve Her Speech

Leda Mox has been teaching people how to massage horses for over a decade. You might not have heard of horses getting massages, but, just like human athletes, horses can benefit from therapeutic massage.

There are not many places in the country where people who love horses and want to care for them can become certified in horse massage. In fact, Leda skipped her own high school graduation ceremony to attend one of these programs in 1997. After years of building experience, Leda decided to open her own small school and offer certifications.

But even though she’s taught 400 students without complaints, the state of Minnesota is threatening to shut Leda down unless she goes through a cumbersome licensing process. The Office of Higher Education thinks that Leda should be treated like a “private career school,” such as a DeVry University or University of Phoenix.

The application process is no easy thing. Leda would need to fill out a 30-page form; pay fees between $2,500 and $4,500 initially and then keep paying thousands of dollars each year for renewals; and provide much more information that does not really apply to her business. Worst of all, the office would need to review Leda’s curriculum to be sure that it adequately teaches horse massage. That’s absurd since no one at the office is more qualified in the subject than Leda is.

Basically, Leda’s school is a square peg and the state wants her to jam it into a round hole.

The costs of complying with the regulations could make Leda’s classes unaffordable for many of her prospective students. She would rather be teaching than cutting through red tape. There is also no telling whether the regulatory burdens and compliance costs will increase in the future. Rather than get on a regulatory treadmill that protects no one, Leda is suing the state with the Institute for Justice.

The First Amendment protects speech and that is precisely what the state is trying to regulate in this situation. The regulations are not coming from the state agency that oversees animals and there is no question about whether the therapy Leda teaches is safe for the horses. What is triggering the regulations is Leda giving people useful information for money. Leda believes this violates her First Amendment rights.

The trend in federal courts in recent years has been greater protection for speech like Leda’s. While some appeals courts had adopted a doctrine allowing for greater regulation of “professional speech,” the Supreme Court notably rejected that categorization in a 2018 decision, NIFLA v. Becerra.

In the time since that decision, appeals courts have relied on it to strike down a law in South Carolina that regulated tour guides, to stop a California board that tried to keep a horseshoeing school from teaching students who didn’t have a high school degree, and to prevent a Mississippi licensing board from shutting down a company that made maps.

Minnesota has created another constitutional problem by allowing exceptions to the regulations. Schools that teach acting or modeling do not need to go through the approval process that Leda is being subjected to. But the state cannot treat schools differently based on the subject matter of what they teach.

Leda simply loves horses and wants to help them thrive. Leda’s students simply want to learn from someone with deep knowledge of horses. If Leda wrote and sold a book about horse massage, the state would not be able to stop her. If she didn’t charge her students, she would not be regulated. There is no reason for state bureaucrats to dig into Leda’s teaching methods after a decade of teaching without incident. Teaching is speech. Hopefully the court will impose some common sense on the government.