Earlier this month, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission voted 8-5 to deny Middle Tennessee State University’s proposal to add a law school to its higher education offerings. Given that Tennessee’s only existing public law schools are located in Memphis and Knoxville, MTSU’s proposal would have added the first and only public law school option to the Middle Tennessee area. Its addition would also have introduced substantial competition into the low-cost segment of Middle Tennessee’s strictly private law school market, which is currently failing to produce.
Blasting criticism of the proposal, MTSU President Sidney A. McPhee called on the Commission to reject the “cartel-like view” that its role was to inhibit competition. Opponents of the plan also appeared to make his point for him. For instance, in urging the Commission to vote down a law school at MTSU, WPLN reports that “[t]he biggest critics of the transfer came from lawyers and law schools in Memphis and Knoxville, where the state’s only other public law schools are located.” Other critics decried the fact that another school in the city: (1) “would take away from other schools’ ability to compete,” (2) “would saturate an already dense legal labor market,” (3) “would make it even more difficult for law school graduates to find work,” and (4) would “insert more law school graduates into an already crowded job market.”
The extent to which “the biggest” critics’ interests in stifling competition factored into the Higher Education Commission’s decision to vote down MTSU’s proposal is not clear. What is clear, however, is that if concerns about enhanced competition in the legal industry or the private law school market—something that uniformly benefits consumers by affording them more choices and lower prices—played any role at all, the Higher Education Commission’s decision was not lawful. Specifically, although Tennessee regulators appear to be unaware of this fact, a vast body of law instructs that raw economic protectionism is an illegitimate governmental interest, and that under both federal and state law, governmental action aimed solely at inhibiting competition is illegal.
In 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held for the first time that “protecting a discrete interest group from economic competition is not a legitimate governmental purpose” and violates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1] As far as state law is concerned, the Tennessee Supreme Court has long held that protectionism is forbidden by the Tennessee Constitution as well. In the 1956 case Consumers Gasoline Stations v. City of Pulaski, for instance, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that “[a]lthough [a] city may have the right to regulate [a] business, it does not have the right to exclude certain persons from engaging in the business while allowing others to do so.”[2] A wealth of additional state precedent spanning more than a century also supports this premise.[3]
Nor is the legal prohibition against raw protectionism a dead letter. Over the past two years, a series of high-profile victories—from the case of bar applicant Maximiliano Gluzman to the case of on-demand beauty and health service provider Project Belle—were specifically defended on that basis, and recent Tennessee statutory law similarly provides that “arbitrarily limiting entry and reducing competition” is not a legitimate public purpose. In sum: At least in Tennessee, the prohibition against economic protectionism is real, it is meaningful, and it is enforceable.
With this context in mind, if attempts to stifle competition in the private Middle Tennessee law school market or in the legal industry more broadly played any role in the Commission’s 8-5 decision to reject MTSU’s proposal to add a law school, then MTSU is entitled to a new hearing. Just as unconstitutional hostility to a litigant’s religious beliefs cannot play a role in an administrative proceeding, nor can unconstitutional hostility to competition factor into the Higher Education Commission’s decisions. Given the prominent and visible role that raw economic protectionism of private industry appears to have played in the Commission’s decision to vote down a law school at MTSU, however, the school should seriously consider its right to appeal.
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[1] Craigmiles v. Giles, 312 F.3d 220, 224 (6th Cir. 2002).
[2] Consumers Gasoline Stations v. City of Pulaski, 292 S.W.2d 735, 737 (Tenn. 1956).
[3] See, e.g., Harbison v. Knoxville Iron Co., 53 S.W. 955, 957 (Tenn. 1899) (“The ‘liberty’ contemplated in [the Tennessee Constitution] means not only the right of freedom from servitude, imprisonment, or physical restraint, but also the right to use one’s faculties in all lawful ways, to live and work where he chooses, to pursue any lawful calling, vocation, trade, or profession, to make all proper contracts in relation thereto, and to enjoy the legitimate fruits thereof.”); Yardley v. Hosp. Housekeeping Sys., LLC, 470 S.W.3d 800, 806 (Tenn. 2015) (noting Tennessee’s established public policy favoring citizens’ “access to employment and the ability to earn a livelihood.”).