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A 14-month court case that didn't make much horse sense to many folks reached a conclusion Thursday in an eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Rockville, far from fields where equines roam.

Let animal massage therapists practice without interference from the state Board of Chiropractic and Massage Therapy Examiners, ordered Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge David A. Boynton.

Because there is no license required to engage in animal massage therapy in Maryland, the board did not have the authority to issue the cease-and-desist order it sent to Rockville massage therapist Mercedes Clemens in February 2008, Boynton said. Clemens started practicing animal massage in 2006, as she said the Maryland State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners had indicated it did not have a problem with massage therapists doing so.

The decision pleased Clemens, her attorneys and supporters who included local massage therapists at the hearing.

"I'm very surprised this case lasted this long," said Clemens, who sued the state boards in June 2008.

Added Paul Sherman, who represented Clemens with the Arlington, Va., libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice: "This is a total victory for economic liberty."

An attorney for the chiropractic board said he wasn't sure if the board would appeal the decision. Sherman said Boynton's order clearly stated the chiropractic board didn't have the authority to tell massage therapists they couldn't work on animals, which would likely make an appeal difficult to succeed.

The case was delayed several times, including due to a scheduling conflict. The veterinary board, which is overseen by the state Department of Agriculture, said in a statement last year that Clemens was "not prohibited from massaging horses for the purposes she describes in her lawsuit." In an earlier letter to Clemens, the veterinary board indicated that someone without a veterinarian's license who massaged animals would be "considered to be practicing veterinary medicine without a license."

But the chiropractic body, under the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, had not issued a statement similar to the veterinary board's latest one and recently filed a motion to dismiss Clemens' lawsuit.

The Institute for Justice has similar litigation pending in Texas, where the group is challenging a law that prohibits anybody but veterinarians from filing down horses' teeth. In another case, a Minnesota court ruled against an institute client who sued in a horse teeth filing case there, saying he had to attend veterinary college to do that.

Clemens, who lives in Gaithersburg and has her office in Rockville, said following the decision that she is eager to return to massaging animals, including horses, dogs and goats. In addition to being a licensed massage therapist for people, Clemens, a horse owner and rider for decades, is privately certified in equine massage.

"That was about half of my practice before," she said. "I had been working part-time [on humans], so now I can go back to having a full-time practice."