Leda Max teaches one of the horse massage classes in Minnesota.
Leda Mox has been teaching people how to massage horses for over a decade. You may not have heard of horses getting massages, but just like human athletes, horses can benefit from therapeutic massage.
There aren’t many places in the country where people who love horses and want to take care of them can become certified in equine massage. In fact, Leda skipped her own high school graduation ceremony to attend one of these programs in 1997. After years of construction experience, Leda decided to open her own small school and offer certifications.
But even though it has taught 400 students without complaint, the state of Minnesota is threatening to close Leda if it doesn’t go through a cumbersome licensing process. The Office of Higher Education believes that Leda should be treated like a “private career school” like a DeVry University or University of Phoenix.
The application process is not an easy task. Leda will have to fill out a 30-page form. pay initial fees of between $2,500 and $4,500 and then continue to pay thousands of dollars each year for renewals. and provides a lot more information that doesn’t really apply to her business. Worst of all, the office should review Leda’s curriculum to make sure she adequately teaches horse massage. This is absurd since no one in the office is more knowledgeable on the subject than Leda.
Basically, the Leda school is a square peg and the state wants to plug it into a round hole.
The cost of complying with the regulations could make Leda’s courses unaffordable for many of her prospective students. He would rather teach than cut red tape. There is also no indication whether regulatory burdens and compliance costs will increase in the future. Rather than enter a regulatory corridor that protects no one, Leda is suing the state with the Institute for Justice.
The First Amendment protects speech, and that is exactly what the state is trying to regulate in this situation. The regulations do not come from the state agency that oversees animals, and there is no question as to whether the treatment Leda teaches is safe for horses. What triggers the regulations is Leda giving people useful information about 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 that allowed for greater regulation of “professional speech,” the Supreme Court specifically rejected that categorization in a 2018 decision. NIFLA v. Becerra.
Since that decision, appeals courts have relied on it to strike down a law South Carolina which regulated the tour guides, to stop a California board that tried to stop a horseshoe school from teaching students who didn’t have a high school diploma and prevent Mississippi the licensing board from closing 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 have to go through the approval process that Leda goes through. But the state cannot treat schools differently based on the subject of what they teach.
Leda just loves horses and wants to help them thrive. Leda’s students just want to learn from someone with a deep knowledge of horses. If Leda wrote and sold a book about horse massage, the state couldn’t stop her. If she didn’t charge her students, she wouldn’t be regulated. There is no reason for state bureaucrats to carve out Leda’s teaching methods after a decade of teaching without incident. Teaching is the reason. Hopefully the court will impose some common sense on the government.
