Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th.
If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage. It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more.
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Send them to ouramericastories.com. They're some of our favorites. And now we bring you the story of Taylor Dooley. She's an actress most known for her role as Lavagirl in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, the 2005 film.
She has returned to acting today in the Netflix film We Can Be Heroes. Here's Taylor with her story. I was just a little girl with a big dream when I was probably 10. Yeah, I was about 10 when I caught kind of the acting bug a little bit. I had been through a few modeling classes and was modeling and having fun. My dad saw this thing to be able to take some acting classes and thought, hey, maybe you might like that as well. So I did.
Absolutely fell in love with it. To my parents' dismay, they didn't know anything about the acting world or anything about it, nor wanted me really to be into it much. But once their daughter fell in love with it, they kind of just really pushed me through that. We were living in Arizona at the time, and my mom was crazy enough and wonderful enough to start driving me back and forth to auditions for commercials and such. So we were driving like eight hours a day to come to California to go on an audition just to drive back home, which was absolutely insane. And then my agency suggested that I should go on theatrical auditions for TV shows, movies.
So they kind of switched me over to there. And that's when one of my very first auditions was The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. I ended up booking that, which was such a special, special thing, and that became kind of the catapulting thing that took my career over a little bit, which is absolutely amazing and I feel super, super blessed for. But growing up in the business is kind of very crazy, and I think that people don't touch on it as much. We kind of hear about it a little bit in the news, and with people who grow up in the business, you kind of...
The media, I think, shies away a little bit from that. Growing up in and around with everybody around the same age as I was hanging out with everyone from Nickelodeon and Disney and all those shows and all those fun things after Sharkboy and Lavagirl came out, it was so much fun. And I had such an interesting childhood getting able to meet all these fun people, but my parents the entire time had this thought that it just was a hard childhood. They thought that I should be able to be a kid and not be working, and so that's kind of...
When people find me nowadays on Instagram, everyone's like, where did you go after Sharkboy and Lavagirl? I kind of vanished a little bit from the entertainment industry, and it was because my parents had the want to take me out and make me live a normal, regular life. When you're a child actor, you have usually... I mean, even as an adult, you have a manager and an agent, usually. And when you're a kid, they don't really talk to you, they talk to your parents, so I didn't really understand or know much of the business aspect of anything. It just was my parents handling everything.
So they, behind the scenes, knew of a lot of stuff that I didn't know that was going on, which is why I had, in my brain, more license to be angry at them when they did pull me out, because I didn't know all the business end stuff that came from it, but my parents just felt like it just didn't feel like you could have an authentic childhood if you were busy being a little adult at 10, 11, 12, even as a teenager. Because when you're a kid, you just usually have to worry about kid things. But when you're in the business, you start worrying about things like how many auditions did you have before you got a call back, or how many times you've booked something, all your friends are working and you're not working, but you're only 14. Most people aren't working at your age, so there's so many rejections that happen before you get one yes. As a kid, it's really hard to swallow that because you're not usually dealing with that amount of rejection. As an adult, you go on work interviews and you are prepared for that mentally and emotionally, but as a kid, you can't separate the why didn't I get the... You're selling yourself as an actor a little bit, and it hurts when you don't get things consistently for a while. I also twofold had something else going on where I kind of grew really early. And in the business, they want older kids that look younger, not younger kids that look older. And so I had a lot of people want to book me for auditions right after Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and then I got so old looking that they were like, well, she doesn't look 14, and I was 14 at the time.
I'm like, but I am 14. So my parents were just looking around and just seeing how all this rejection was devastating my confidence in who I was. My parents always describe me to myself.
They'll tell me that I was a really self-confident, super outgoing, they would say, and I was like a little spark plug. And a few years in the business, I was getting depressed and I was getting sad because when you love something that much, I couldn't understand why I wasn't working when some of my friends were or things weren't happening for me. And it just was really devastating to who I was. So my parents didn't like that. And they were really worried about what that would look like and translate to into adulthood or young adulthood, just having that self-doubt. And so they wanted to put me in high school to just take a break from it and not worry about it and to be a normal kid so that I could come back as an adult and be able to handle the rejection and everything that comes with being an actor. At the time, I didn't agree with them. And I think my mom put me in high school and I remember crying in the front office, telling her that she did not love me because she was making me stop acting and go to school like a normal teenager. And I remember just being such a wreck in the front office of this high school. Like, if you leave me here, I promise you, you just hate me.
You must hate me. I was so upset with her. And you're listening to Taylor Dooley tell the story of her experience in Hollywood as a child. By the way, everything she's saying applies to grownups, too. It's a tough, tough life.
It is a life filled with rejection. And by the way, her parents, luckily for her, saw the change in her life, the depression, from a spark plug to a depressed teenager. And so the family interceded, intervened, and protected their daughter. When we come back, more with Taylor Dooley, her story, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's OurAmericanStories.com. Hey, you guys. This is Tori and Jenni with the 90210MG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NerdTek ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NerdTek ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango?
It's true. I had one that night and I took my NerdTek ODT and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NerdTek ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NerdTek ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So, lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit UHCmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare.
Helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop. But for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot.
And I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we return to our American stories and the story of Taylor Dooley. She played Lava Girl in the adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl. But her parents decided that the acting business was not a good environment for a 14-year-old girl. So they took her out and put her in regular high school. Taylor was upset at first, but now more than 15 years later, she has a different perspective.
Back to Taylor. And hindsight, it ended up being the best thing to ever happen to me. Because I got to kind of live not such a sheltered life and do some of my other life goals before I was able to get back into acting now. So I'm thankful that they did that because I definitely learned a lot about myself. And I had a few years, I think, that after leaving the industry that I kind of got really upset and mad at God for a while. Because I would say to him, why did you put something so deep on my heart? Like, why do I love this so much, but yet I can't do it? Like, my friends are working and I'm not.
Why is that? And I realized throughout the years that it was just because I had already always prayed for God. That it was just because I had already always prayed and wanted an adult career and to be an adult actor. Because I never really wanted to do the kid fluff stuff. I was always so much older than my age acting.
I was like 13 and I used to tell everyone I wanted to be like Natalie Portman. I was always very, I just wanted a very serious adult career, which doesn't happen when you're a kid usually. So it kind of was, I think, God's way of answering my prayer in a roundabout way.
You just never know when you're in it and it feels emotional when you're in it. And now that I'm on the other side of it, I'm thankful that I didn't work through those years and that my parents pulled me out. And I was able to take that break because it allowed me to, as I said, it allowed me to kind of grow as my own person.
And heal from some of the wounds that I feel like as a child actor I got from the rejection and all that stuff. And to be able to just kind of have a basis of who I am. And it also helped shepherd kind of more of a faith I've always, my family has always been. I kind of grew up, my parents found God when I was young-ish. I think I was like five or six when we started going to church. My parents started learning a little bit more about God.
I am from, originally from Michigan. My whole family, my parents had never left Michigan until we moved for my brother's health. And my brother was a twin, born insanely prematurely. He was born three and a half months early. But we ended up losing one of the twins, one of my brothers. But my brother was a miracle baby, my other brother who did make it.
His name's Andrew. He made it. And his lungs were just severely underdeveloped and the cold from Michigan was really hard on his lungs. So we needed to move someplace warm. So my parents found Arizona, which is insanely warm.
So it worked out perfectly. And my brother, who could barely walk because his lungs were so horrible, I think we moved when he was four and I was six. And by the time we moved to Arizona, we were there like two weeks and he was already being able to swim and dive in the pool. His lungs had just developed so much better in the warmth, which was such a blessing in and of itself. But that's, my brother is kind of how my parents found God, because with the tragedy of the twins and not knowing my brother was in the NICU for over 100 days, because when he was born, he was born just over a pound.
He was just the tiniest little thing. They kind of, through that experience and losing my other brother and trying to worry about whether my brother Andrew was going to live, they found God and found their faith and kind of kept it through all those years. They really were what showed me what faith kind of looked like, but what was kind of crazy is that we were kind of all learning to do it together. My parents, they called themselves baby Christians at the time because they didn't really know anything about it. So they just, we all kind of were learning together as a family, which I think made it so much closer for all of us.
We were always very close, so I kind of was always grown up knowing about that. But I kind of really took my faith as my own as I was able to step out of the business and kind of be a teenager away from everything. When you're kind of that age of angsty, wanting to know what this world is about, it was nice to be able to be away from the industry and being away from that to be able to kind of cultivate my own faith and my own identity as to who I am, because when you're in the business at such a young age, it's like such a sheltered, people kind of tell you who you are, because it's like an oxymoron. You have to grow up so quickly and be a little adult at like 11 years old, but then they also tell you who you are.
It's like as a kid, it's really hard to muddle through what's what, and so it was nice to be able to take a step back. And then when I went to high school, I didn't, I tried theater for a little bit, and I loved it, but it just didn't feel like, there was like always this cattiness because I was an actress and because I used to work that I felt like some of my theater, the people in theater were so catty with me about that, and I didn't want to deal with all of that, so I was like, eh, I'll quit that and not do that, because I just didn't have the time or want to do that. So I instead found my own group of friends, which I still have to this day from high school, and was able to, in the very beginning they were, I got made fun of because I was Lava Girl, and it was usually in an endearing way people would call me Lava Girl. It was like they were ribbing me, but in high school, everyone likes to make fun of everybody. And at the same time, Taylor Lautner, who played Sharkboy, was going to high school with me, so people would make fun of us because Sharkboy and Lava Girl went to the same high school. Knew that people were just ribbing us when they all loved the movie, so it just rolled right off my back, and I was able to make friends that, like I said, I still have to this day, and then all that space and time from the acting world allowed me to be able to make friends with people who kind of had no idea who I was in a certain way, because sometimes people, when they were older, didn't necessarily watch Sharkboy and Lava Girl. Actually, when I met my husband, funny enough, people used to call me Lava Girl, and he had no idea, because my husband's 10 years older than I am, he had no idea what a Lava Girl was, so he thought it was some really weird nickname from high school. And finally one day he was like, why do people call you that? And I had to break, I was like, I'm an actor, I was a child actor, and I was this character, Lava Girl.
He had absolutely no idea for like the first, I think, like five months that I knew him, which was nice. It was nice to just be, you know, a normal human being. Went to college, graduated college, met my husband, which all of which would have never happened, and had two beautiful, amazing, wonderful kids, and was able to kind of somewhat live a normal life until Robert Rodriguez called me in 2019, because we shot in the fall of 2019 for the new movie We Can Be Heroes. I had just had my daughter, and she was two or three months old when I got a phone call from Robert, telling me that he was wanting to bring back Sharkboy and Lava Girl for this new film, and that we'd have a daughter, and all this really fun, exciting stuff about this new movie, and was asking if I'd be willing to come back and play Lava Girl again after all these years, and it had been 15 years since Lava Girl first appeared in my life, so I was totally gung ho for it.
I was able to go right back to work a few months later. I got my butt into shape after being pregnant, so I had a few months to get back in shape and was in the fall filming We Can Be Heroes with Robert getting to be Lava Girl again with my crazy pink hair, and they were so sweet to let my entire family come to Austin, Texas to film, so I had my kids with me, and it was just such a wonderful kind of reintroduction back into the business, and to me, just such a beautiful way that I felt like God was telling me that after all these years, I did the right thing by stepping away, and my parents, actually, who made me and did the right thing by making me step away, because I was able to come back into the business from a new perspective as a mother, as an adult, as a wife, as an adult woman, to be able to make more decisions and know who I am now after all of these years. It was just such a beautiful thing, and I told Robert this, but I have such special feelings for Lava Girl because she started my career twice now. She is light.
That's her character. That's like her superpower is that she's not just that she's lava. If you've seen the first movie, it's all about the fact that she discovers that she is light, and it's just, to me, such a beautiful kind of symbolism in everything to be able to come back as Lava Girl all these years later who's just light, and I just kind of feel like that's what I'd love to be in this world if I can, just would like to spread love and light.
And wouldn't we all, and a special thanks to Robbie and to Faith for producing and putting together that beautiful piece. Go to Netflix, We Can Be Heroes is the movie, and you get to see Lava Girl 15 years later. The story of Lava Girl, the story of Taylor Dooley, here on Our American Stories.
Hey, you guys. This is Tori and Jenni with the 90210MG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NerdTek ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th Poll Event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NerdTek ODT Remigipant 75mg can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango? It's true! I had one that night, and I took my NerdTek ODT, and I was present and had an amazing time.
Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NerdTek ODT Remigipant 75mg. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NerdTek ODT Remigipant 75mg is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So, lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year. And UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare.
Helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop. But for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot.
And I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner. And on it. Like a good neighbor? State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we return to our American stories. Now, it's time for another Rule of Law story as a part of our Rule of Law series where we show what happens when there's either an absence or presence of the rule of law in our lives. Here's a story about a landmark case on economic freedom in the state of Texas. My name is Wesley Hodet. I'm a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice. I've worked at IJ since I graduated from law school in 2008. And my first job was at IJ's then new Texas office in Austin. I was working there a little bit late one night.
I think it was around 6.30. And a couple of guys came into the office after everyone else had left. I didn't know them, but I went out to the front and introduced myself.
They were Ash Patel and Anverali Satani to business owners who said that they had a problem with the state and they wanted to know if I would agree to talk to them about it. From there, I learned that their business was being threatened with being shut down because they employed eyebrow threaders. These are typically South Asian women who use a beauty technique involving nothing but a single strand of cotton thread. They put tension on that, form a kind of lasso, and it allows you to precisely remove hair around the eyebrows for beautification. And when Ash and Anver had set up their business, they told me they looked at Texas' cosmetology laws and saw nothing specifically about threading.
They plowed ahead like all good entrepreneurs do without asking permission. And it turned out that the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation had, after the fact, decided that they thought threading was cosmetology. It followed that everyone that worked for Ash and Anver needed a cosmetology license.
None of them had one. And as we later discovered, the cosmetology schools weren't teaching threading or testing anyone. They were going to go learn other people's cosmetology techniques. They were going to go learn other people's jobs just to qualify to continue doing their jobs. And you're talking about women that had been doing this professionally for 30 years, discovering at the age of 40 that the state expected them to go back to school.
Now, we all understand that that could be impossible for a variety of reasons. We're talking nine months of schooling in a licensed cosmetology school. They're almost always private businesses at a minimum. For some people, it takes two years, depending on what license they're trying to get. You've got to pay that private business quite a bit of money.
You know, it usually ranges from, like, $7,000 to $15,000. You can't work while you're going to this school because, again, you've got to be there full time. You probably will, however, work for the private cosmetology school, which has people come in and pay for cosmetology services, but they keep the money. At the end of all of that, you have to take a couple of exams. There's almost always a practical component where you have to show that you know how to do the basic techniques.
And there's almost always a written component, like a test you would take in school about how bacteria grow, where different styles originated from, what people mean when they say things like a beehive or cornrows. So this is an example of what we call occupational licensing. It's the requirement that before you can do something to pursue a living, even though we all consider that thing to be legal, you need the government's permission. Now, there are a lot of professions that automatically come to mind when we think about occupational licensing, doctors, lawyers, engineers. And indeed, the licensing of those professionals has been around for a long time. But in the 1950s in this country, it was about 5% of the American workforce that required some form of occupational licensing.
Today, it's much closer to 20%. And that has profound social and economic impacts, particularly for people who are on the margins of society and on the margins of where it makes sense to begin licensing people for things. Cosmetology is a good example of this because it's often the first rung of the entrepreneurship ladder, especially for people from other countries who don't have a lot of language skills and a lot of other opportunities. This is perhaps why you see recent Asian immigrants predominating in places like nail salons or why you see recent African immigrants predominating in places like hair-braiding salons. It's because they have a marketable skill that people will pay for.
It's just they've really only got one. And cosmetology licensing in the 20s might have been about basic sanitation, but as time has gone on, it's become more about incumbent control of the industry. I mean, in every state, there's a committee who has jurisdiction over an executive agency whose responsibility it is to regulate the cosmetology industry. Usually by law, that agency has to be run by cosmetologists. Everyone that's on the board of the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, there's supposed to be at least some people who are cosmetologists and some people who represent other walks of life. And so that agency will go to the relevant lawmaking committee and say, we think there need to be more restrictions on, for example, this new practice of threading that we're only beginning to see in our state. And the people who will be in the audience to sort of provide public comment will be beauty school owners and other cosmetologists.
And that means that the people who control the policy outcomes are the people who stand to gain or lose the most. And I mean, the motivation is obvious. You want to keep new competition out of the market so that you can charge more.
So their basic question that night was, can you help us? And I sort of gleefully said, we might be able to, because I had been studying up on the Texas Constitution and was familiar with a line of cases on the one hand that provided very robust constitutional protection against irrational regulations like this. And on the other hand, I was aware of another line of cases that hewed much more closely to the federal constitutional standard for economic regulations, namely the rational basis test. Is there any conceivable justification?
And if there is, the economic regulation is constitutional. So I was aware of the tension between these two lines of cases, and I wanted a case involving an economic regulation that would allow us to tease them out. And I immediately saw the potential in Ashen Anver's predicament. And when we come back, more with our American stories and with Wesley Huddit. And he's an attorney with the Institute for Justice defending Ash Patel, who runs an eyebrow threading business in Texas. Hey, you guys, this is Tori and Jenny with the 90210MG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by NerdTech ODT. We recorded it at iHeartRadio's 10th poll event, Wango Tango. Did you know that NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams can help migraine sufferers still attend such an exciting event like Wango Tango?
It's true. I had one that night, and I took my NerdTech ODT, and I was present and had an amazing time. Here's a little glimpse of our conversation with some of our closest friends. This episode was brought to you by NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams. Life with migraine attacks can mean missing out on big moments with friends and family.
But thankfully, NerdTech ODT Remedipant 75 milligrams is the only medication that is proven to treat a migraine attack and prevent episodic migraines in adults. So lively events like Wango Tango don't have to be missed. Soon millions will make Medicare coverage decisions for next year, and UnitedHealthcare can help you feel confident about your choices. For those eligible, Medicare Annual Enrollment runs from October 15th through December 7th. If you're working past age 65, you might be able to delay Medicare enrollment depending on your employer coverage.
It can seem confusing, but it doesn't have to be. Visit uhcmedicarehealthplans.com to learn more. UnitedHealthcare, helping people live healthier lives. I know everything there is to know about running a coffee shop, but for small business insurance, I need my State Farm agent. They make sure my business stays piping hot, and I stay cool and confident. See, they're small business owners too, so they know how to help you best. State Farm is in your corner and on it. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Call your local State Farm agent for a quote today. And we're back with our American stories in our Rule of Law series and the story of the Ash Patel case as told by his attorney, Institute for Justice lawyer Wesley Hodit. When we last left off, Ash Patel, a man who employed eyebrow threaders, had been told he'd have to shut down his operation and send all of his threaders back to cosmetology school for anywhere between nine months and two years of courses that didn't have anything to do with their craft. It seemed burdensome, and there was a disconnect between Texas' laws and the federal laws on economic freedom, so Wesley thought he might have a case. Let's continue with the story. There was an uncertainty in Texas law. There was one line of cases that seemed to say we do something more than what the federal government does when a person complains about a regulation that's making it too difficult or impossible to support themselves. And one line said that the government needed to have robust reasons that lined up with the real world. In other words, under Texas' culture and traditions and laws, the government had to have a good reason for requiring a restriction on someone's economic rights, and that reason had to make sense in the real world.
I'll give you an example. There was a case from the 60s where a small Texas town had restricted the size of fuel tanker trucks that could come through the town. Their justification for that was that they were concerned about fires. What that required in practical terms was that the large tanker trucks that operate everywhere else had to stop outside of the town and transfer into two smaller tanker trucks, which the court recognized based on testimony at a trial was a huge risk of fire.
And having two trucks on the road that could go boom was worse than having one truck on a road that could go boom. So the court in that case, it's called Humble Oil, ruled that under the Texas Constitution, the law was unconstitutional. You couldn't require that sort of irrational justification. Now under federal law, the story has been quite different since around the New Deal period. Under federal law, we currently have an understanding of the U.S. Constitution's protections for economic liberty as being very anemic, almost worthless. The federal constitution, the Supreme Court has told us, requires only some conceivable justification for a law. And so I think if we compare that to the Humble Oil case, the government's going to get a lot of leeway in determining the size of fuel tanker trucks because fuel tanker trucks go boom. And indeed, the federal case law bears out that kind of government-may-do-anything reasoning.
So that is why when Ash and Andver came into my office and described their problem and said, can you help, that is why I was so confident that there was a there there. Because state supreme courts exist to resolve those kinds of conflicts within their own case law. You know, lower courts are supposed to know what the law is before they can apply it correctly. And if, as in Texas, you know, you have these two lines of cases, some of them hewing to federal constitutional standards and some of them hewing to the more robust Texas standards, then there's confusion that can lead to inconsistent results depending on, you know, who your judge ends up being and where you end up filing your case. The whole point of bringing this case was to establish that under the Texas Constitution, there has to be a real and substantial connection between what the government is trying to do and how the regulation works in the real world.
And even if that connection exists, courts still ask, is the regulation unduly burdensome in light of what the state is trying to achieve? It seems maybe like there could be a real and substantial connection to health and safety. If you go to cosmetology school, you do admittedly learn things like washing your hands. But what Texas was requiring was 750 hours of instruction.
That's about nine months of a full-time job. Two tests, neither of which had any, you know, material about eyebrow threading specifically or about sanitation specific to eyebrow threading. And so our argument all along was it takes about an hour to learn the sanitation that you need to learn to be a safe threader.
You need to wash your hands, use new thread with every customer, and keep the work area clean. So it's just inconceivable that that could take 750 hours to learn. We never disputed that there could be a license for threading. It was just that this license, the 750 hour to examination requirement that didn't involve any instruction in threading, was obviously unconstitutional. So, like so much of public interest law, this case started out with a loss. The state won. We appealed and we lost. The state won in the Intermediate Court of Appeals. And then we had to ask the Texas Supreme Court for what lawyers call discretionary review.
And they agreed to take the case. We won in the Texas Supreme Court by a vote of six to three. Now, five of those justices agreed with our argument that the state constitution requires a real and substantial relationship between a regulation and how it functions in the real world, and also can't be unduly burdensome. They struck the law down based on that Texas test. One justice agreed that this law was unconstitutional, but didn't think that there needed to be an independent Texas test to make that ruling.
He thought the law violated the federal rational basis test because it was just so inconceivably justified. But, you know, there were three dissenters who were very vocal about the fact that they did not want to be reviewing economic regulations, did not take seriously Texas being different from the federal government in terms of its protections for economic liberty, and thought that it was perfectly fine that threaters were being required to spend nine months in a private beauty school learning nothing about their own jobs. Now, this was a huge landmark victory for IJ. It was obviously life-changing for the clients in the case. It's an incredible feeling to have the patience to wait years. We launched this case in 2009, and we got a decision from the Texas Supreme Court in 2015.
It's about five and a half years from beginning to end, and it was mostly losing. So, you know, it's an incredible feeling to have that victory call with your client. But there's so much more work that needs to be done. I mean, this is one case in a sea of burdensome economic regulations that really require court intervention. And it's very difficult to get, you know, at least judges of the current generation to unlearn what they were taught in law school, that there's no economic regulation that a court can strike down. You know, what is needed here is like what is needed in so many other aspects of American life today.
Nuance. Of course, it's true that the political branches have the right to decide who should get to practice what occupations. But it is also true that we should not allow them to do that at the behest of the regulated industry and only for their benefit. In the American constitutional order, courts are there to ensure that individuals' rights are being honored in the lawmaking process, right? And it's absolutely essential that there be more cases like Patel, where particularly state courts, but ultimately federal courts as well, take seriously the time-honored individual right to use your own labor, your own hands, to support yourself, free of any restrictions that aren't justified by a need that the public has, not a need that a particular lobbyist or lobby might have. And a special thanks to Monty Montgomery for his great work on the piece. And a special thanks to Wesley Huddit, the Institute for Justice attorney, who you heard tell this remarkable story, this important story.
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Whisper: medium.en / 2023-02-15 20:24:27 / 2023-02-15 20:41:16 / 17
