This Woman Fought for 20 Years to Change the Rules for Hair Braiding in Texas

[Recursion]

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/style-beauty/news/a41742/isis-brantley-hair-braiding-texas/

This is from a few months ago but I just found it. More after the quote.

After a 20-year struggle with the government, including an arrest and multiple legal battles, 57-year-old Isis Brantley has won her fight to deregulate the hair braiding industry in Texas. On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law House Bill 2717, which exempts hair braiders from having to acquire a cosmetology license to operate within the state.

This is a significant win for Brantley and other women in the African American community, who have been either forced to spend thousands of dollars to gain skills and acquire resources that they won't use or risk being arrested. While barbers and cosmetologists use a wide range of tools and chemical products, hair braiders rely primarily on their hands. Brantley and her lawyers sought to strike down the restrictions for hair braiders, resulting in Monday's law. Cosmopolitan spoke to the business owner about her long battle for equal opportunity, the red tape she had to cut through, and the work that has yet to be done.

In the 1970s there was a version of this (though about gender rather than race) that a friend of mine was involved with. He was a lawyer for the state of Texas and was asked to write a legal brief (which ended up being 15 pages long) on what the exact definition of "sideburn" was as regards the state regulations on barbers and cosmetologists: cosmetologists were allowed to trim sideburns, whereas only barbers could trim beards.

The brief was pretty interesting. He pointed out that when the laws were written in the 1930s, cosmetologists were women who cut women's hair and barbers were men who cut men's hair, whereas that was (at the time) beginning to no longer be relevant. He also added a kind of snarky aside that questions of this importance and consequence were exactly why he went to law school.

The brief was, briefly, that the law was passed at the request of the state barbers' association, and was pretty clearly an attempt to avoid competing with (female) cosmetologists. But, as much as he didn't like that law, it was the law, and furthermore the law also gave the barbers' association the authority to define "sideburn" vs. "beard". Until such a definition was made, my friend suggested that if two sideburns meet to form a beard, the "sideburns" extend to even with the corner of the mouth, or where the moustache connects, whichever is higher, but that if they do not meet or only meet over the lips, then any hair on the cheeks or neck was "sideburns".

Anyways, my only thought was that that story and this story are pretty good examples of how regulations can be used by powerful groups to stack the deck against less powerful groups.

[mgmaggiemg]

1. I remember this story from a while ago

it's nice to know she won

[Recursion]

2. Ah, here's the opinion. It was later than I thought; 2000.

He had started in the 1970s though, and he told it as an old war-story.

https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/opinions/opinions/49cornyn/op/2000/htm/jc0211.htm

The determination of the boundary between hair and the beard beyond which a licensed cosmetologist may not pass, requires technical expertise which this office does not purport to possess. In certain past opinions regarding jurisdictional boundary disputes between regulatory bodies, this office has held that such definitional matters were the responsibility of both entities. Thus in Attorney General Opinion DM-423, this office found that insofar as hyperbaric oxygen therapy was the practice of medicine it was subject to regulation by the Board of Medical Examiners, but that if and insofar as it was within the practice of podiatry, it was subject to regulation by the Board of Podiatric Examiners. Tex. Att'y Gen. Op. No. DM-423 (1996). Similarly, in Attorney General Opinion DM-443, we held that the development of general rules regulating the practice of needle electromyography "would require the cooperation of both [the Board of Medical Examiners and the Board of Physical Therapy Examiners], and is not within the province of either board exclusively." Tex. Att'y Gen. Op. No. DM-443 (1997) at 3. In those instances, however, the practices to be regulated were within the jurisdiction of both licensing bodies. Here, the cutting and trimming of the beard is exclusively within the practice of barbering. Since the Board is given authority under section 1601.151(d)(3) of the Occupations Code to "regulate any area of the practice of . . . barbering" and under section 1601.151(e) to "define any term necessary to administer or enforce" its statutory authority, it is within its province to determine, in effect, where hair leaves off and beard begins. Such a determination is, of course, subject to judicial review.

As the incident giving rise to your request suggests, a formal determination of this sort will permit licensed cosmetologists to know the extent of their rights and the boundaries beyond which they may not pass. Such notice to licensees is of great importance given the doctrine of "void for vagueness," under which a statute must not be so vague that persons "of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application." Connally v. General Constr. Co., 269 U.S. 385, 391 (1926) (quoted in Texas Antiquities Comm., 554 S.W.2d at 928) (plurality opinion).

The doctrine of void-for-vagueness is derived from the requirement of due process. "A vague statute offends due process in two ways. First, it fails to give fair notice of what conduct may be punished, forcing people to guess at the statute's meaning, . . . and threatening to trap the innocent. . . . Second, it invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement by failing to establish guidelines for those charged with enforcing the law, 'allow[ing] policemen, prosecutors, and juries to pursue their personal predilections.'" Commission for Lawyer Discipline v. Benton, 980 S.W.2d 425, 437 (Tex. 1998) (citations omitted).

It is by no means always required that a person of ordinary intelligence guess whether what he or she is cutting is "a beard" or hair. A goatee such as those now in vogue, for instance, is certainly a beard. Difficulties arise, however, particularly with reference to sideburns. We think it likely that most observers would consider the sideburns worn by the late Elvis Presley at the time of his early success in 1956 as part of his hair. On the other hand, whether the muttonchops which adorned his face at the time of his death were hair which a cosmetologist might trim, or a partial beard which could be serviced only a barber, is a question which in the absence of any articulated standard might well present difficulties to a cosmetologist who wished to remain within his or her licensed practice.

That is pretty amazing...