The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed To Work, and Why It Goes Wrong

Allensworth, whose research at Vanderbilt University Law School focuses on antitrust and professional licensing, guides readers through a thoughtful exploration of professional licensing in the United States. She explains that professional licensing creates barriers, limits the number of practitioners in a profession, and drives up consumer costs. Using her home state of Tennessee as an example but drawing on national data to back up her assertion that licensing is a broader issue in the U.S., she demonstrates that boards overseeing licensed professionals are underfunded, and their members are inadequately trained. These boards are generally made up of members of the profession which they oversee, leaving impacted consumers without a voice. Using numerous case studies, Allensworth illustrates how ineffective these boards are in disciplining serious misbehavior of members of their profession, with board members frequently more concerned with the cost of training new professionals than the harm done to consumers.