Clark Neily joined the Institute for Justice as a senior attorney in 2000. He litigates economic liberty, property rights, school choice, First Amendment and other constitutional cases in both federal and state courts.
He served as counsel in a successful challenge to Nevada’s limousine licensing practices, which effectively prevented small business-persons from operating their own limousine services in the Las Vegas area. He was the lead attorney in the Institute’s successful defense of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy against a lawsuit by the Michigan Education Association challenging the Center’s right to quote the MEA’s president in fundraising literature, and he is currently leading IJ’s opposition to a nationwide effort to cartelize the interior design industry through unnecessary and unreasonable occupational licensing.
Clark is also the leader of the Institute’s school choice team. Besides representing parents and children in defense of Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship Program and school choice programs in Arizona, Milwaukee, and elsewhere, he has made numerous public appearances and participated in many debates in support of school choice.
In his private capacity, Clark served as co-counsel for the plaintiffs in District of Columbia v. Heller, the historic case in which the Supreme Court announced for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep guns at home for self-defense.
Before joining the Institute for Justice, Clark spent four years as a litigator at the Dallas-based firm Thompson & Knight, where he received first-chair trial experience and worked on a wide variety of matters including professional malpractice, First Amendment and media-related matters, complex commercial cases and intellectual property litigation.
Clark received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Texas, where he was Chief Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge Royce Lamberth on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The vet board’s latest gambit has been to propose a new rule that would allow non-veterinarians to use hand tools when floating horses’ teeth, while requiring licensed veterinarians to supervise any activities involving power tools. But power tools are perfectly safe and have been used by floaters for more than a century without problems.
Moreover, as noted in the vet board’s own 2004 study, most veterinarians lack sufficient training or experience to properly perform teeth floating, so the notion that they have any business supervising it is absurd.
The Texas vet board will take up the proposed rule during its next meeting on September 10 in Austin. At a public hearing last month, horse owners and state-licensed veterinarians both came out against the rule—horse owners because the rule is too restrictive of their right to choose who works on their horses, and veterinarians because it isn’t restrictive enough.
There are more than one million horses in Texas and six thousand working veterinarians; only a small fraction of those veterinarians have the ability to properly float horses’ teeth. Despite recognizing that “[t]here are not enough veterinarians skilled in equine dentistry to meet the public’s needs,” the vet board stands poised to give them a monopoly on teeth floating in Texas.
Horses and bureaucrats do have one thing in common—they both produce a lot of fertilizer.
Clark Neily is a senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, which is representing a group of horse owners and horse teeth floaters challenging the vet board’s anti-competitive regulation of teeth floaters.
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