An East Tennessee reverend whose low-priced coffin store the state tried to close got a clean reprieve today from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court upheld the August 2000 decision of U.S. District Court Chief Judge Allan Edgar striking down the state’s requirement that only licensed funeral directors can sell caskets.

The case of the plaintiff, Rev. Nathaniel Craigmiles, has been championed by attorneys with Washington, D.C.-base Institute for Justice, a group that litigates on behalf of entrepreneurs harmed by governmental regulation. They had maintained that efforts to block Rev. Craigmiles’ sales of cheaper caskets outside the licensed cartel were motivated by funeral home directors on the state licensing board who wanted to stifle competition.

In today’s decision, a three-judge panel led by Judge Danny Boggs concluded that the state-imposed cartel violated the 14th Amendment. It has been a decision anxiously awaited by free-market legal proponents wishing to chisel away at the 1873 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Slaughter-House that said, in very general terms, that the 13th and 14th Amendments don't guarantee federal protection of individual rights against discrimination by their own state governments.

”We invalidate only the General Assembly’s naked attempt to raise a fortress protecting the monopoly rents that funeral directors extract from consumer,” he writes in the unanimous opinion. “This measure to privilege certain businessmen over others at the expense of consumers is not animated by a legitimate governmental purpose and cannot survive even rational basis review.”

Steven Hart of the financial unit of the state attorney general’s office, argued that the state had a compelling health interest in regulating casket sales. The appeals court rejected this argument, citing the district court’s earlier inability “to find any way in which the application of the Funeral Directors and Embalmers Act to the plaintiffs promoted health or safety.”

According to today’s Sixth Circuit opinion, candidates on the mortuary school track have only one accredited school in Tennessee, Gupton College on Church Street. “To complete the required year at Gupton, the candidate must take eight credit hours in embalming, three in restorative art, and twenty-one in funeral service.