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(File photo/Gulflive.com)

Jeff Rowes, an attorney with the nonprofit Institute for Justice

By Jeff Rowes and Renee Flaherty, attorneys with the nonprofit Institute for Justice, which represents Shelia Champion

Huntsville is famous for high-tech companies that make rockets fly faster and farther. But one revolutionary entrepreneur is going low-tech. Shelia Champion has opened a "green" cemetery called The Good Earth in Hazel Green, Alabama, where people will be laid to rest in a wild, untended forest. Remains may not be embalmed, and they will be buried in biodegradable caskets or shrouds.

Unfortunately Alabama law has turned Shelia into a criminal. As part of her business, she wants to sell inexpensive caskets and shrouds that her cemetery will accept. But Alabama permits only state-licensed funeral directors to sell funeral merchandise. If Shelia were to sell one of her caskets--made of either cardboard or untreated wood--she would face up to a year in jail. Yes, Shelia could go to jail for selling a cardboard box.

Her desire to sell simple caskets has put this unassuming grandmother at the center of one of the most important unsettled constitutional questions in the country: Can the government pass laws just to make industry insiders rich?

This law has nothing to do with protecting the public. A casket is just a box and a shroud is just a piece of fabric. Outside of Alabama, there is a thriving retail market for caskets, and even big box stores like Costco sell them.

Renee Flaherty, an attorney with the nonprofit Institute for Justice

Alabama funeral directors have done here what special interests too often do: Get laws passed that restrict competition and drive up prices for consumers. Funerals are big business. The average funeral now costs $8,000-$10,000. Rocket scientists might be amused to learn that a Texas company will send ashes into orbit for less than what it would cost to bury them on earth. And the casket is usually the biggest expense, which makes Shelia's innovation such a threat.

The funeral industry has a long history of conspiring against consumers using its government-granted monopoly. Traditionally, funeral homes would not itemize prices, would not disclose prices, would charge for goods and services without consent, and would force consumers to buy everything in a bundled package. Thirty years ago, the Federal Trade Commission put a small dent in the monopoly by forcing funeral homes to allow families to use caskets that they acquire from someone else.

But the FTC unwisely left it open to states to determine who gets to sell caskets. And so, to make sure that a funeral-home cash register rings every time someone dies, Alabama lets only Alabama funeral directors sell them. Economists estimate that laws like this drive up the cost of funerals by hundreds of dollars, which, of course, is exactly the point.

Not only are sales restrictions terrible policy, they also violate Shelia's constitutional right to earn an honest living free of unreasonable government interference. That is why she filed suit last week in federal court in Huntsville to vindicate her economic liberty and that of every American entrepreneur.

In recent years, four out of five federal courts to consider casket-sales restrictions have struck them down as unconstitutional. In 2013, for example, the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey in Louisiana won the right to sell their handmade caskets to the public.

The only court to uphold such a law did so by ruling that it is actually permissible for the government to pass laws that do nothing but harm the public and enrich politically connected insiders, describing this as the "favored pastime of state and local governments." That wrongheaded decision recently led another federal court to agree that the government may restrict the economic liberty of entrepreneurs and consumers just to shower special interests with a windfall.

This fundamental disagreement among the federal courts has set up an eventual showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court over whether special-interest legislation with no public benefit is a legitimate use of government power.

Like special interests everywhere, Alabama funeral directors treat the law as something of the funeral directors, for the funeral directors, and by the funeral directors. Shelia Champion is ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court to make sure that liberty does not perish.