Rudy Carey completed more than 200 credit hours of coursework at Northern Virginia Community College after he was released from prison in 2007 and got certification as a substance abuse and rehabilitation counselor. He found work as a counselor at a substance abuse treatment center after first completing a rehabilitation program for drug addiction.

His new employer valued the personal experience he brought to the work, but Carey was let go in his fifth year on the job after new managers at the center became concerned that employing Carey was illegal. Virginia law bars people convicted of 176 different “barrier crimes” from working as drug counselors, according to a lawsuit Carey filed in September to overturn the law.

Carey spent three years in prison after striking a police officer during an arrest. The law prohibits people convicted of certain crimes—including assault and battery of an official, robbery, and prostitution—from working as drug abuse counselors or in other “direct care position” jobs with responsibility for “treatment, case management, health, safety, development, or well-being of an individual receiving services.”

Virginia is not alone in mandating such bans. Every state in the country has laws that restrict job options for people with criminal records, as does the federal government, according to the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

“People change,” said Andrew Ward, an attorney representing Carey at the Institute for...

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