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.

Oregon law: Practicing means working, not saying

[raymorris]

The Oregon statute also defines what practicing engineering means under the law. The statutory definition, while overbroad, covers *working* as as engineer, not *saying* you're an engineer.

https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors...

1) "Practice of engineering" or "practice of professional engineering" means doing any of the following:
(a) Performing any professional service or creative work requiring engineering education, training and experience.
(b) Applying special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such *professional services* or creative work as consultation, investigation, testimony, evaluation, planning, design and services during construction ...

To any Oregon bureacrats who happen to be reading this:
I'm an engineer. I'm also a train conductor. And a unicorn. Fuck you, Oregon.

Knowing how citizens of the left coast tend to think, they'll decide that the solution to this abuse of an overbroad regulation by power-hungry bureaucrats is to create more regulations, to be wielded by more power-hungry bureacrats.

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.

Correcting myself

[raymorris]

I just read ORS 672.007. Under Oregon law saying "I'm an engineer" counts as "practicing engineering". There is still a first amendment issue.
https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors...

Still, I must say:
I'm the tooth fairy.
I'm an engineer.
I'm a unicorn.
Fuck you, Oregon.

Re:Correcting myself

[Man On Pink Corner]

This is common language for most states; the title "engineer" is reserved, and representing yourself as one without being registered in the state you "practice" engineering is a violation.

No, it isn't. What's reserved is the title of Professional Engineer (PE), which he didn't claim to hold.

Re:Correcting myself

[LoneBoco]

That doesn't seem to hold up in court, though.

https://scholar.google.com/sch...

In that case, a woman completed a four year post-doctorate fellowship in psychology at Yale, had her Ph.D. for education published in a psychology journal, taught psychology at college, studied under psychologists, and was a member of the American Psychological Association for years. She did not, however, have a license to practice psychology in Texas. She would sometimes give psychological advice and, when she ran for a political position, she said she was an attorney and psychologist on her website. The Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists demanded she stop saying she was a psychologist because she wasn't licensed to be one in Texas.

The court basically said it was an infringement of her first amendment rights. She wasn't giving advice to a client. Her background suggests calling herself a psychologist is not misleading. In fact, the court said that commercial speech is speech that "proposes" a commercial transaction, not speech for profit. So even receiving compensation for speech isn't necessarily commercial in nature and can be protected.

So, at the end of it, he probably has a case that his speech is protected. There seems to be precedent.

Old boys network at its worst

[James McP]

This is a travesty*, the shameful, traditional closing ranks of an organization to protect their own. He is lodging a complaint with the board about a potential safety issue. Even if his analysis was entirely without merit it deserves a more respectful response.

For the record: I am a licensed civil engineer (PE). I am no longer a practicing engineer (retired/inactive).

*I do think he should have gotten a note warning him about the legal ramifications of using the term "engineer". Most people don't know it requires licensing. Having a foreign engineering degree means he doesn't have any background with US licensing standards.

Even then it's stupid. Most of the engineers in the world are unlicensed. You only need a couple of PEs in most cases.

Of course these days the term is already worn as thin as kleenex and no stronger than jello. IMHO we (professional engineers) lost all claims of governance over the term "engineer" the day the engineering license boards didn't wage war over "sanitation engineer".

Re:Yes but

[hey!]

Thought experiment. Let's suppose you're a CIVIL engineer -- the type of engineer the regulations are intended to target. You're on vacation in Oregon, and you notice a serious structural fault in a bridge which means that it is in imminent danger of collapse.

Under this interpretation of the term "practice engineering" you wouldn't be able to tell anyone because you're not licensed to practice engineering in Oregon. In fact anyone who found an obvious fault -- say, a crack in the bridge -- would be forbidden to warn people not to use it until it had been looked at.

Which is ridiculous. Having and expressing an opinion, even a professionally informed opinion, isn't "practicing engineering". Practicing engineering means getting paid -- possibly in some form other than money. At the very least it means performing the kind of services for which engineers are normally paid.

A law which prevented people from expressing opinions wouldn't pass constitutional muster unless it was "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public interest" -- that's the phrase the constitutional lawyers use when talking about laws regulating constitutionally protected activities. In this case the public interest is safety, which would be served by a law which prevented unqualified people from falsely convincing people that a structure was safe. But there is no compelling interest in preventing an engineer from warning the public about something he thinks is dangerous or even improper.

So if the law means what they claim it to mean, it's very likely unconstitutional.

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?

Re: Yes but

[hawguy]

He's and EE not a Civil or Mechanical engineer. He's got no business at all using his engineering degree to discuss things way outside the realm of his field. The state was 100% correct and should have fined him in the thousands.

Unless you're a civil rights attorney, you have no business at all using your degree (if you even have one) to discuss free speech. If it's not within your field of study, then you obviously can't know anything about it since civil rights are very technical and specialized and require years of study before you can even utter one word about the topic.

Not News

[eggman9713]

I am a professional engineer licensed in Oregon. This is very typical for OSBEELS to do. The term "engineer" has very specific legal meaning, and in most states it implies registration and license as a professional engineer. The reason that Oregon and other states vigorously pursue people who claim to be engineers without licensure is to protect the public from those who claim to be engineers but do not have the education or experience to be admitted to the profession. Oregon happens to pursue these types of issues more vigorously than other states I have been licensed in, but this is nothing new. The claim that his first amendment rights are being violated is laughable (but IANAL). He is free to make his case, but he cannot call himself an "engineer" without being licensed.