IDPC files brief in Florida unconstitutional interior design lawsuit

 

Institute for Justice/Interior Design Protection Council Join Forces to Take Down Interior Design Cartel

The Interior Design Protection Council (IDPC), joined by ten other interior-design and allied organizations, has filed an Amicus (“Friend of the Court”) Brief in the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the appeal filed by the Institute for Justice last month.  At issue is a Florida law that requires a government-issued license to perform commercial interior design work.  Given that there has never been a documented instance of harm from interior design in the 47 states that do not regulate the practice of interior design, it is quite clear that licensing interior designers has nothing to do with protecting the public and everything to do with protecting industry insiders from fair competition.

On February 4th, Federal District Judge Robert L. Hinkle declared unconstitutional the portion of the Florida law that prohibited people without a license from referring to themselves as interior designers, as well as sharply narrowed provisions of the law restricting the practice of interior decorating in commercial buildings by unlicensed persons. “This ruling is an important first step to getting Florida’s unconstitutional interior design laws struck down entirely,” said Clark Neily, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that litigates nationwide on behalf of entrepreneurs facing anti-competitive state licensing laws like Florida’s interior design practice act.

IDPC is a nonprofit organization whose sole mission is to protect the rights and livelihoods of interior designers and related occupations, by educating, organizing, and mobilizing grassroots opposition.  Its brief argues that the court’s decision failed to understand that interior design is really a fundamentally expressive activity, compounded that error by ignoring the severe burdens that Florida’s statute imposes, and disregarded conclusive evidence that interior design licensing serves no countervailing public interest.

“Interior design is a dynamic profession that celebrates innovation, creativity and diversity, and consumers directly benefit from the multiple pathways into the field,” said Patti Morrow, founder and director of IDPC.  “Florida’s one-size-fits-all occupational licensing scheme could not be more contrary to those values, and that’s why ten major organizations have signed on to support our brief.”  IDPC is spearheading the movement to resist the efforts of a small, elitist faction of interior designers that is attempting to cartelize the industry through arbitrary and unreasonable occupational licensing laws.  In doing so, IDPC has helped beat back over 100 different attempts to impose or expand restrictions on interior designers around the country in the past four years.

The court of appeals is expected to hear oral arguments in the Florida interior design appeal (Locke v. Shore, No. 10-11052-EE), in 2010 or early 2011.

“The district court’s ruling that Florida’s statute is ‘not subject to First Amendment scrutiny’ because ‘there is a ‘personal nexus’ between the interior designer and the client’ represents a dramatic and unwarranted expansion of the professional speech doctrine,” wrote attorney Robert Kry of Molo Lamken, L.L.P., Washington, DC, author of IDPC’s Amicus Brief.  Kry is among the country’s foremost authorities on the so-called “professional speech” doctrine, which effectively eliminates First Amendment protection for certain kinds of vocation-related speech.  As Kry explains in the IDPC brief, “Where the First Amendment is at stake, proponents of licensure must do more than concoct overwrought hypotheticals about exploding fabric finishes and furniture-placement deathtraps for the disabled. Yet for all their years of trying, that is all those proponents have been able to muster.”

“Arguing that the State’s power to license doctors or lawyers implies a power to license interior designers is like arguing that the State’s power to license motor vehicle operators implies a power to license the press,” continued Kry.  “It makes no sense.”

Click here to read the Amicus Brief of the Interior Design Protection Council et al:  http://www.idpcinfo.org/Amicus_Brief_of_Interior_Design_Protection_Council_.pdf