BY PARKER WORTHINGTON
There is a saying, attributed to the late Kentucky racing official Frank Muth, that echoes through the pages of Robert L. Heleringer’s sweeping second edition of Equine Regulatory Law: “You can beat a race, but you can’t beat the races.” It is the kind of observation that sounds like wisdom until you finish reading this book, at which point it sounds more like a warning — and an accurate one. The 787-page volume, published in 2026 by the University Press of Kentucky, is the most comprehensive legal treatment of American horse racing regulation available, and it arrives at a moment when the sport finds itself in precisely the kind of legal and institutional turbulence that makes such a guide essential.
Heleringer, a Kentucky attorney and veteran of equine regulatory practice, published the first edition of this work in 2012. In the fourteen years between editions, the landscape shifted in ways that even a seasoned practitioner could not have fully anticipated — a Kentucky Derby disqualification, a decade-long trainer suspension that wound through courts across multiple jurisdictions, the most sweeping federal regulation of horse racing in the sport’s history, and hundreds of decisions from state racing commissions whose outcomes have reshaped what due process looks like at the track. The second edition captures all of it, and does so with the rare combination of legal rigor and accessible prose that has made Heleringer one of the most readable authorities in this specialized field.
The State Racing Commission: Power, Limits, and the Courts
The book opens with its longest and most densely case-laden chapter — a comprehensive survey of state racing commissions and their relationship with the courts, the trainers and owners they regulate, and the constitutional framework that ultimately governs all of it. Heleringer’s central argument here is elegantly simple: racing commissions wield enormous power, but the judiciary is the check that keeps that power from becoming unchecked.
Due process is the organizing principle. Any commission hearing must satisfy procedural requirements — written notice of charges, adequate preparation time, the right to subpoena witnesses, the right to cross-examine, an unbiased hearing officer, and a recorded proceeding. When final decisions are appealed, courts examine whether those requirements were met and whether the outcome was supported by substantial evidence, free from arbitrary or capricious reasoning.
What is striking, and what Heleringer documents through nine carefully selected disciplinary cases, is how often the commissions lose. In five of the nine cases examined in this section, commission decisions were reversed or set aside by reviewing courts — a reminder, as the author notes with dry precision, that the odds do not always favor the house.
Among the most notable cases is Stewart v. Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, the first time a Kentucky appellate court reversed a final order of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission. Veterinarian Dr. Rodney Stewart had been suspended four years for possession of cobra venom — a substance permitted in standardbred racing but not expressly forbidden in thoroughbred regulations. The Court of Appeals found the regulation unconstitutionally vague: if the same substance is allowed in one discipline and silently prohibited in another, a veterinarian of ordinary intelligence cannot reasonably be expected to know which rules apply. The commission’s regulation, the court held, did not provide adequate notice of what conduct it actually prohibited.
The chapter also covers claiming rules — one of racing’s most contentious regulatory zones — financial responsibility cases, and what Heleringer calls the “(mis)application and interpretation of regulations,” a category that amounts to a catalog of instances in which commissions applied their own rules in ways that courts found legally untenable.
The Kentucky Derby Goes to Court — Again
Chapter Two is the book’s most immediately dramatic, covering the first-ever disqualification of a Kentucky Derby winner for a foul committed during the race and the legal challenge that followed. The Derby, as Heleringer observes, has seen the courts before — the first edition covered an earlier dispute involving the race — but the disqualification of Maximum Security in 2019 raised questions about procedural fairness, the standards for stewards’ rulings, and the extent to which judicial review can reach the on-track decisions of racing officials.
Without revealing every nuance of the legal analysis, the chapter illustrates a fundamental tension that runs throughout the book: the deference courts traditionally extend to administrative bodies like racing commissions versus the constitutional floor below which no regulatory decision can fall, regardless of how specialized or technical the subject matter.
The Absolute Insurer Rule
Chapter Four examines one of horse racing’s most controversial legal doctrines — the absolute insurer rule, which holds trainers strictly liable for any prohibited substance found in a horse under their care, regardless of how it got there or whether the trainer had any knowledge of its presence. The rule has been justified as necessary for the integrity of racing; its critics argue it punishes the innocent and creates incentives to game rather than comply.
Kentucky’s version of the rule was struck down as unconstitutional by a circuit court, then reinstated by the state’s Court of Appeals — a legal whiplash that Heleringer uses to illuminate the genuine philosophical division within the judiciary about whether strict liability in a regulatory context can ever satisfy constitutional due process requirements. His analysis of the competing cases and the “dexterity of lawyers” in arguing both sides is among the most engaging passages in the book.
Bob Baffert, Exclusions, and the Limits of the Licensee’s Rights
Chapters Five and Six cover exclusions, ejections, disciplinary actions against licensees, and liability for injuries to licensed participants. The Baffert saga — which Heleringer describes with evident exasperation as “a serial production in both federal and state courts across a number of racing jurisdictions” — serves as a through-line for the broader discussion of what rights a licensee actually possesses when a racing authority seeks to exclude or suspend them.
Because most of Baffert’s battles did not reach the appellate level, Heleringer features only one of them directly. But the chapter uses the broader pattern of high-profile trainer litigation to examine the constitutional question that underlies all of it: does a racing license constitute a protected property interest for due process purposes? The answer, developed across decades of case law, is nuanced but consequential — and the book traces it with the care that question deserves.
HISA: Racing’s Most Ambitious — and Contested — Reform
The most contemporary and arguably most consequential section of the book is Chapter Eight, titled “Sometimes Government Works: The Brave New World of HISA.” The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, passed in 2020 and amended in 2022, represented the most sweeping federal intervention in horse racing regulation in the sport’s history — a direct response to a series of horse deaths, doping scandals, and the persistent argument that the patchwork of state-by-state regulation was inadequate to the national scope of the problem.
HISA’s passage was only the beginning of the story. Its implementation has been contested in federal courts across the country, with the Fifth and Sixth Circuits reaching opposing conclusions that have left the act in what Heleringer accurately describes as “a somewhat precarious state.” The Sixth Circuit upheld HISA’s constitutionality. The Fifth Circuit struck down the act’s enforcement provisions, finding that delegating enforcement authority to a private entity without adequate federal oversight violated the private nondelegation doctrine — a constitutional principle that Congress cannot hand executive power to private actors who are not subordinate to a government agency.
The practical implications are serious. As Heleringer articulates: if the private authority created by HISA cannot enforce its decisions through subpoenas, investigations, fines, suspensions, or injunctive relief in states within the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction, the act’s stated purpose — national uniformity in medication standards and racetrack safety — is fundamentally compromised. Two states, Texas and Louisiana, could effectively operate under a different regulatory regime than the rest of the country, undermining the entire rationale for federal intervention.
As of this book’s publication, the question of whether the Supreme Court will take up HISA’s fate remains unanswered. Heleringer, characteristically, does not speculate about the outcome. He frames the question with precision and leaves it open — which is exactly right, both legally and journalistically.
Barry v. Barchi: A Fifty-Year Retrospective
The final chapter is in some ways the most historically satisfying — a retrospective on Barry v. Barchi, the 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision that remains the only equine regulatory law case to reach the high court from the federal appellate level. The case established foundational principles about due process in racing commission proceedings that have shaped the law ever since, and Heleringer’s fifty-year look back at its origins, its reasoning, and its legacy is both rigorous and genuinely moving — a tribute to a case that did more than most to bring constitutional seriousness to a field that had not always received it.
A Necessary Book
Equine Regulatory Law, Second Edition is not light reading. It is a law book — dense with case citations, procedural analysis, and technical regulatory detail — and it does not pretend otherwise. But Heleringer writes with a clarity and occasional dry wit that keeps even the most technical passages from becoming impenetrable, and his “Comments” sections that follow each reproduced case excerpt are among the book’s genuine pleasures: analytical, opinionated, and occasionally wry in a way that reminds the reader that behind all of this doctrine is a practitioner who has spent decades actually living inside this world.
For lawyers who practice in this space, the book is essential. For stewards, commission members, and racing administrators, it is a guide to the legal framework within which they operate and the constitutional limits of their authority. And for the broader equestrian and racing community, it is a window into the extraordinary complexity of the regulatory apparatus that governs an industry built on speed, money, and the partnership between humans and horses — an apparatus that, as this book makes clear, the courts are still actively shaping.
Equine Regulatory Law, Second Edition, by Robert L. Heleringer. Published by The University Press of Kentucky, 2026. 787 pages. Available in hardcover and digital formats.
