January/February 2018

PE Report
Oregon Case Highlights Free Speech, Engineering Practice

Oregon’s attorney general ruled in December that the state engineering and surveying licensing board violated a man’s free speech rights after the board fined him $500 for the unlicensed practice of engineering.

The case began when Oregon resident Mats Järlström’s wife was mailed a $150 fine for a driving violation at a camera-monitored intersection. Järlström, who earned an engineering degree in Sweden but is not a PE, conducted his own study of the traffic light’s timing and found the timing of the lights unfair. After sharing his finding with the media and state officials, including the engineering and surveying licensing board, he was fined by the board.

The case drew wide attention in the media as an example of government overreach and an infringement of free speech. For example, in June, nationally syndicated columnist George Will wrote, “If you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license.” He described the case as “symptoms of something sinister,” and mocked the board for considering Järlström to be, “like Jesse James, Al Capone, and John Dillinger, a dangerous recidivist.”

For NSPE, the attention generated by the case put engineering licensure in a bad light. To clarify the need for licensing, then NSPE president Kodi Verhalen, P.E., Esq., F.NSPE, submitted a letter to the editor of the Washington Post explaining that the main distinction between an engineer and a licensed engineer is the legal and ethical duty of PEs. “It isn’t a matter of one being superior or smarter than the other, the piece of paper you hold from your college or university, where you earned your degree, or the organizations you’ve joined,” the letter stated. “It is a matter of meeting the legal prerequisites for carrying out the practice of engineering on projects that have public safety implications as defined by that state’s laws and rules.”