Last week, the Institute for Justice scored a resounding victory for the right to earn an honest living in an unlikely case that pitted woodworking monks against the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors. The New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — where I clerked — ruled in a final, unanimous decision (including one Obama-appointed judge) that Louisiana violated the St. Joseph Abbey monks’ economic liberty when it forbade them from selling the caskets they make to support their religious order.

Significantly, the court ruled that the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to enact laws simply to shield industry cartels from honest competition. Although IJ was already assured of victory, given that Fifth Circuit had issued a divided preliminary opinion in October, that ruling left open some tricky questions that this latest decision definitively settled.

Last Wednesday’s ruling makes clear that laws having no purpose but to enrich certain protected interests are unconstitutional, using reasoning that should be a model for courts across the country.

Louisiana now has 90 days to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court — which supporters of economic liberty should welcome because IJ’s previous litigation created a split in the federal lower courts that can only be resolved, for the nation as a whole, by the Supreme Court.

For more on St. Joseph Abbey v. Castille, see IJ’s case page and this Wall Street Journal op-ed by IJ’s Chip Mellor and Jeff Rowes. And if you’re a law student interested in using your legal skills to promote liberty this summer, you should apply to IJ’s epic public interest boot camp (of which I’m a graduate, though in my day there wasn’t any skydiving or aikido).