Imagine a board run by your competitors who decide whether you’re allowed to work. That is the process of licensing.
Rebecca Haw Allensworth’s The Licensure Racket opens with the story of Omar Mahmoud, a 52-year-old Army veteran, Arabic-speaking immigrant, and licensed barber. After moving to Tennessee, he hoped to continue the career he had pursued for over thirty years.
Instead, he was denied an interpreter and failed the state’s English-only barbering exam twice.
When he begged for help, one board member said, “Unless you want to test, like, eight more times and then come back, we can talk then.” The board denied his license unanimously.
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Allensworth, a Vanderbilt Law professor, delivers a searing exposé of America’s licensing system, which governs roughly 20 percent of the workforce. Far from protecting consumers, licensing boards often serve professional insiders, enforcing arbitrary standards that ratchet up requirements. This limits the pool of professionals and harms the very public they’re meant to protect.
The book’s strength lies in its mix of human stories and deep analysis. Allensworth attended licensing board meetings in Tennessee and across the country, interviewing applicants and regulators, as well as sifting through mountains of legal and administrative records. What she found was a system where protectionism masquerades as professionalism.
Volunteer boards, she found, are often staffed by members of the profession they regulate. Board members wield enormous power over entry into jobs ranging from hair braiding to neurosurgery. Consumers assume these boards ensure skill, ethics, and at least a lack of malice—but in case after case, Allensworth shows boards prioritize professional turf over safety.
In Tennessee, a hair braider was fined thousands of dollars for operating a salon that employed unlicensed braiders, a license requiring a 300-hour training regimen in a state that lacked the necessary education services to provide it. Meanwhile, licensed alarm-system contractors received no penalties after repeated consumer complaints, while unlicensed neighbors who helped install security cameras purchased from Sam’s Club faced tall fines.
Most chilling are the stories from medicine and law.
Medical boards, she argues, contributed to the opioid crisis by failing to discipline overprescribing doctors and reinstating others with histories of sexual misconduct. In one infamous case, law enforcement had to intercede where a neurosurgeon’s surgical errors killed multiple patients, while the licensing board failed to act. Lawyers with ethical violations, including sexual abuse, also routinely retain their licenses, disproportionately harming vulnerable clients.
According to Allensworth’s data, boards are ten times more likely to act against unlicensed workers than to respond to consumer complaints involving safety or malpractice.
Often, it’s not about quality—it’s about control.
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This logic—that formal credentials signify competence, even when real-world performance suggests otherwise—mirrors the dysfunction of higher education. Universities, like licensing boards, promise to certify skills and safeguard the public, but too often function as gatekeepers defending their own status, regardless of outcomes.
Despite its investigative power, the book stops short of proposing a grand solution. Allensworth suggests pragmatic reforms: adding non-industry bureaucrats to boards, implementing sunset reviews for outdated licenses, and adopting sunshine laws to make board decisions transparent. She also explores more radical alternatives, such as premises licenses and drastic culling of such credentials.
Yet, she’s honest about the cultural and emotional pull of licensure. One of the book’s most powerful vignettes captures this tension perfectly: Fatou Diouf, a Senegalese immigrant and skilled braider, resented the state’s requirement that she obtain a license for a technique she had mastered since childhood. But when the license came, she felt proud—legitimized by the very system she also viewed as unjust.
The Licensure Racket is a sobering, nuanced look at how the state grants permission to work—and how that power, when unchecked, can erode both opportunity and trust. Allensworth doesn’t claim to have all the answers. But she asks the right questions, and in doing so, challenges us to rethink what fairness, competence, and public safety really mean.
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Cover by Jared Gould using The Licensure Racket cover & bookshelf background by VTT Studio on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 495370723
