Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer' (vice.com)

pogopop77 quotes a report from Motherboard: In September 2014, Mats Jarlstrom, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state's engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights don't last long enough, which "puts the public at risk." "I would like to present these facts for your review and comments," he wrote. This email resulted not with a meeting, but with a threat from The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying [stating]: "ORS 672.020(1) prohibits the practice of engineering in Oregon without registration -- at a minimum, your use of the title 'electronics engineer' and the statement 'I'm an engineer' create violations." In January of this year, Jarlstrom was officially fined $500 by the state for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered." Since the engineering board in Oregon said Jarlstrom should not be free to publish or present his ideas about the fast-turning yellow traffic lights, due to his "practice of engineering in Oregon without registration," he and the Institute for Justice sued them in federal court for violating his First Amendment rights. "I'm not practicing engineering, I'm just using basic mathematics and physics, Newtonian laws of motion, to make calculations and talk about what I found," he said. Sam Gedge, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Motherboard: "Mats has a clear First Amendment right to talk about anything from taxes to traffic lights. It's an instance of a licensing board trying to suppress speech."

Comments

Re:Yes but

[WarJolt]

Right. You are NOT a lawyer, but you are free to represent yourself. It is only practicing law if you do things for a client.

You can be an engineer without practicing engineering. You can be a Doctor without practicing medicine. A title doesn't mean anything when it comes to practicing a trade.

Slashdot ads

[MrKaos]

You don't need to be an engineer to measure slashdot advertisements now cover a full third of the screen while stories load and now 1/3 of the horizontal space which means the comment density requires much more scrolling.

I hope he wins his suit

[Baron_Yam]

I'm all for restricting the use of credentials - like 'Doctor', for instance - to people certified by the state to use them. However, that restriction should only come into play when they're using those credentials professionally or to lend authority to a fraudulent claim, which this man was not.

He was speaking the truth, arguably for the public good, and he IS an engineer, just not one registered to work professionally in the state. His background does make his study and its findings somewhat more credible to those incapable of understanding it themselves... but he's RIGHT, so he's not trying to use that title to defraud anyone.

I hope he wins his lawsuit.

Re:I hope he wins his suit

[rahvin112]

He mailed the engineering board, the licensing authority, NOT the people in charge of traffic lights or having anything to do with them. Either he was trying to get fined by claiming to be an engineer or he's a fucking moron.

Some states have very strict licensing laws with regard to the term engineer, other restrict that to the term professional engineer. Nevada blocked Novell "engineers" from claiming they are such. The law on this is pretty settled, the guy is going to be lucky to pay that fine, by claiming he was an engineer directly to the licensing board he opened himself to the boards authority and they have the authority to incarcerate engineers under their authority and they can levy some pretty hefty fines.

I still can't figure out why he mailed anything to the engineering board. They have nothing at all to do with traffic lights, their sole purpose is engineering licensing. He mailed them a letter claiming to be an engineer. He might as well have mailed the bar claiming to be a lawyer or the medical licensing board claiming to be a medical doctor. That's how stupid what he did was.

Re:Yes but

[sjames]

He IS an engineer, he is not practicing in the state of Oregon. Practicing is the part that requires registration, so this falls somewhere between a quick cash grab and wanting to shut him up.

Re:Yeah, go ahead, blame TRUMP!

[Chas]

Uh. What does Trump have to do with this?

This started in 2014 and finished up on 12 January 2017. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Trump didn't swear in until the 20th.

So the entirety of this sad debacle in the suppression of freedom of speech happened on Obama's watch.

Not that it was necessarily Obama's fault either. But, by your brain-dead "logic" it is...

This is about a collusion between state government agencies to shut someone up who is attempting to alert the public to one or more agencies' shady practices at the expense of said public.

Re:Trust me I am a doctor

[slashrio]

If you are educated as an engineer and passed all exams, you're an engineer, no matter what a state board says.
But they can regulate the conditions under which you are allowed to practice your trade as an engineer.
Regarding this particular case it's all legal skullduggery in order to shut him up instead of taking his complaint serious.
To me this tells it all. Are you going to help them with that?