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The Modern Law Library

‘The Licensing Racket’ takes aim at professional licensing system in America

By Lee Rawles

February 19, 2025, 9:02 am CST

Should you need a license for that? For law professor and antitrust expert Rebecca Haw Allensworth, there are huge problems with professional licensing in America—and her solutions might not make anyone completely happy.

In her new book, The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, & Why It Goes Wrong, Allensworth takes a deep dive into the history and function of licensing in the United States. While licensing boards are put forth as a way to protect consumers, Allensworth says in practice, their decisions can be arbitrary, and their disciplinary functions can be flawed.

In this episode of The Modern Law Library podcast, Allensworth and the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles chat about a range of professions that currently require licenses, from hairdressing to law and medicine. While disciplinary procedures for lawyers are not open to the public, she was able to attend a number of proceedings for health care workers accused of wrongdoing, and what she found sometimes shocked her—and even shocked some of the people responsible for making those disciplinary decisions. She shares some of those stories in the episode.

The Licensing Racket argues that licensing should be done away with for many professions. For those that remain, however, Allensworth thinks that much more must be done by government agencies, rather than allowing professions to self-police themselves through volunteers and licensing boards.

In This Podcast:

Rebecca Haw Allensworth. (Photo by Chad Driver)

Rebecca Haw Allensworth studies antitrust and professional licensing. Her work on antitrust focuses on how to adapt competition policy to address competition problems posed by tech platforms, and her research on professional licensing explores how lawmakers should balance the need for expertise in regulating the professions with the problems that can arise from self-regulation. She is the author of The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, & Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard University Press, February 2025), a deep dive into the pathologies of professional licensing in America. More about the book and her research have recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Freakanomics Radio and the Atlantic. Her work has also been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and has received the 13th annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for Antitrust Scholarship.