On May 30, North Carolina blogger Steve Cooksey filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit that has the potential to define the scope of Internet freedom and address one of the most important unanswered questions in First Amendment law: What happens when occupational licensing laws conflict with free speech? The U.S. Supreme Court has not addressed this issue in nearly 30 years, and even then no majority opinion emerged. The legal challenge concerns something virtually all of us have done: use the Internet to seek out personal advice. For issues ranging from teething babies to marital problems to home repair, the Internet and social media have made it possible to get highly personalized advice from strangers. And much of this advice concerns topics like health, in which practitioners are often regulated by state licensing boards that wish to control who is permitted to give advice. That’s where Steve Cooksey, from Stanley, N.C., comes in. In February 2009, Cooksey was rushed to the hospital in a near diabetic coma. After years of sedentary living and poor diet, he had developed Type II diabetes. His doctors told him he would be dependent on drugs and insulin for the rest of his life. While in the hospital, Cooksey spoke with a North Carolina-licensed dietitian who told him to eat a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet, limit his caloric intake, monitor his blood sugar and inject insulin as needed. But as Cooksey began reading more about his condition in books and on the Internet, he became increasingly skeptical of the dietician’s advice. Because diabetes is an inability to properly process sugar, he found himself attracted to theories by advocates of low-carbohydrate/high-fat diets. After much research, Cooksey eventually settled on a “Paleolithic” diet, which involves eating food similar to that eaten by our Stone Age ancestors, eschewing sugars, processed foods and starches in favor of fresh vegetables, fish, meats, eggs, fats and nuts. After adopting a Paleolithic diet, Cooksey underwent a dramatic personal transformation. He lost 78 pounds and is now in excellent health; he freed himself of drugs and doctors, normalized his blood sugar and insulin, and considers himself fit and energized. Cooksey started a blog to share his experience and advice, becoming an advocate for the Paleolithic diet on his free Web site, Diabetes-Warrior.net. As his Web site grew in popularity, Cooksey developed friendships with many of his readers, several of whom he began advising and counseling on how to overcome the challenges of adopting a Paleolithic diet. Eventually, he began offering a one-on-one coaching service, whereby for a fee he would provide this same sort of advice, counseling and encouragement in phone calls and e-mails to customers. Cooksey also started to receive questions from readers, which he would respond to in a free Dear Abby-style online advice column. Unfortunately for Cooksey, his Web site caught the attention of authorities. On Jan. 13, Cooksey received a phone call from the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition informing him that his advice about what to buy at the grocery store  even his uncompensated advice to friends  constituted the unlicensed and, hence, criminal practice of dietetics. The board sent him a 19-page print-up of his Web site, which its members had gone through with a red pen, informing him that his private, uncompensated advice to friends is illegal “assessing,” that the published advice in his Dear Abby-style column is illegal “counseling/advising,” and that his coaching service is illegal, too. The red-pen review struck out various statements the board members claimed he could not legally make unless he became a licensed dietician, a process that takes years and costs thousands of dollars. The penalties for violating the dietetics-licensure statute range from fines to jail time. When government officials are literally using a red pen to strike out statements from a Web site, it would seem obvious that the freedom of speech is in jeopardy. Remarkably, however, the Supreme Court has said little about the degree to which occupational licensing laws like North Carolina’s implicate the First Amendment. The last time the Court came close was in a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, Lowe v. SEC, in which a three-justice concurrence, written by Justice Byron White, argued that advice is not protected by the First Amendment when it occurs in certain fiduciary contexts such as the lawyer-client relationship. The Court has never adopted White’s concurrence as law, and in the 27 years since Lowe was decided the Court has taken a more libertarian approach to enforcing the First Amendment. Just three years after Lowe, the Court in Riley v. National Federation of the Blind rejected the notion that occupational licensure was “devoid of all First Amendment implication.” The 1980s and 1990s also saw increased protection for commercial speech, including requirements that the government produce actual evidence to justify restrictions on commercial advertising. And in the past decade the Court has also become far more protective of political speech in the campaign-finance context. Unfortunately for Cooksey, while the Supreme Court has moved in a decidedly more speech-protective direction since 1985, lower courts have largely continued to behave as if Lowe were the last word on the First Amendment implications of occupational-licensing laws. These courts have adopted an expansive interpretation of the Lowe concurrence to uphold licensing for psychotherapists, accountants and, most recently, interior designers, concluding that such licensing laws are subject to no First Amendment scrutiny. Even if the lower courts’ approach were defensible at one time, recent Supreme Court precedent has disproved the notion that government has unfettered authority to regulate all one-on-one advice. In 2010, the Supreme Court held in U.S. v. Stevens that federal courts could not exclude a category of speech from the protection of the First Amendment unless there were evidence that the category had been historically considered unprotected. That sort of historical evidence is wholly lacking for most types of occupational speech, which have only recently come under regulation (dietetics, for example, was not licensed until Texas passed the nation’s first licensing law in 1983; North Carolina adopted its law in 1991). Also in 2010, the Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project held that even expert legal advice is “speech” within the scope of the First Amendment, and that burdens on that speech are subject to heightened judicial scrutiny. These decisions establish a simple proposition: Laws that regulate who may give advice should be reviewed the same way courts review other burdens on First Amendment rights. That means engaging in a meaningful inquiry into whether the speech at issue poses an actual threat to the public, and whether the burdens on that speech are appropriately tailored to address that threat without needlessly chilling speech that the government has not shown to be actually harmful. Applying that kind of analysis to Cooksey’s speech makes clear the irrationality of the North Carolina board’s actions. There is perhaps no kind of advice more ubiquitous than dietary advice, and our general societal presumption is that competent adults are fully capable of weighing conflicting dietary advice and deciding for themselves what to eat. That’s why Cooksey has joined with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm to challenge the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition’s attempt to silence his speech. The government cannot require speakers to get a government license simply to give ordinary advice. Indeed, the government can no more require Cooksey to become a licensed dietician than it could require Dear Abby herself to become a licensed psychologist. That rule may not please the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition  which undoubtedly would prefer to maintain a lucrative, status-enhancing monopoly over the provision of dietary advice  but it is the only rule that makes sense in a world where the Internet has dramatically expanded the power of individuals to seek out advice online. More fundamentally, it is the only rule consistent with the First Amendment’s command that government “shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” Paul Sherman is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents the plaintiff in Cooksey v. Futrell.