AUSTIN, Texas—Last Thursday, the Fifteenth Court of Appeals dismissed a case filed by Katherin Youniacutt and Tammy Thompson, two Texas grandmothers with master’s degrees who want to be social workers. The case challenged the constitutionality of a 2019 law creating a lifetime ban on working in several healthcare occupations, including social work, based upon convictions decades in the past. This ruling comes after a district court previously denied the government’s attempt to dismiss the case, calling the challenged law “irrational.” The two women, represented by the Institute for Justice (IJ), plan to petition the Texas Supreme Court to take up the case on appeal.

“Katherin, Tammy, and everyone else in a similar situation deserve justice and the right to work,” said IJ Attorney James Knight. “Katherin and Tammy have paid for their mistakes. Continuing to punish them even after they’ve served their debt to society doesn’t protect the public, it only creates an irreversible injustice.”

Katherin and Tammy have been trying for years to earn an honest living doing social work in Texas. Both women struggled with substance abuse issues early in their lives and each woman pleaded guilty to a single assault conviction during that time. Nearly two decades later, Katherin and Tammy have turned their lives around and want to help people facing similar problems.

But Texas won’t let them. A 2019 Texas law imposed a new, permanent punishment on Katherin and Tammy: Despite their rehabilitation, they are forever barred from working as social workers. Even the licensing board that oversees social workers is powerless to consider Katherin and Tammy’s actual qualifications and circumstances. Under the 2019 law, their old convictions are all that matter.

Katherin and Tammy brought this lawsuit to challenge the unconstitutional lifetime ban in the courts. Under the Texas Constitution, Katherin and Tammy have a right to pursue an honest living in an occupation of their choice free from unreasonable government interference. When the state legislature restricts Texans’ economic liberty, it needs actual evidence to support its restriction on that right. Here, the state doesn’t have any.

Katherin and Tammy’s suit comes at a time when Texas—and the country—face an exploding mental health and substance abuse crisis coupled with a dire shortage of professional social workers to address those issues. And Katherin and Tammy’s history overcoming the same challenges their clients face is an asset, not a reason to exclude them from practice. As a court acknowledged in denying the motion to dismiss, “[a] categorical ban on personal experience directly relevant to a job is irrational.”

Founded in 1991, IJ litigates nationwide to defend property rights, economic liberty, educational choice, and free speech. IJ is leading the charge against permanent punishment laws across the country. In Pennsylvania, IJ won its challenge to a law requiring would-be cosmetologists to prove they had “good moral character” to work in skincare. In Tennessee, IJ stopped the FCC from revoking the broadcast license of Knoxville’s only Black-owned radio station because of the owner’s misstatement on his personal tax papers more than a decade earlier. And in Maryland, IJ halted a USDA policy banning store owners with convictions related to alcohol, drugs, or firearms from accepting SNAP payments.

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To arrange interviews on this subject, journalists may contact Phillip Suderman, IJ’s Communications Project Manager, at [email protected] or (850) 376-4110. More information on the case is available at: https://ij.org/case/texas-fresh-start-social-worker/