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That's just insulting... the state says they acted unconstitutionally.. so they offered him $500 -- which is just a refund of the fine he already paid -- and as

That's just insulting... the state says they acted unconstitutionally.. so they offered him $500 -- which is just a refund of the fine he already paid -- and asked the court to dismiss the case. After he had to pay 4 years of lawyers fees, take them to court, etc. It's just a big FU, and I have no doubt they won't change a thing if they successfully get the court to dismiss it. If the court allows this, then the state won. They've sent their message: pay the fine, or we'll fight you in court for years, force you to pay thousands to lawyers, and maybe in the end we'll give you a refund of any fine you paid if it looks like you might win.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
The best tool in any court case is time.
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  Seriously, this. It is such bs, since most lawyers are incentivized to take as much time as necessary since they work on an hourly basis.
  - vermontdevil 9y ago
    Umm no. Not all lawyers. They do take time because they want to win. And sometimes they have to be sure as some cases can be complicated.
    - bigchewy 9y ago
      Ummm unless lawyers somehow have evolved different brains than the rest of us, they, too, prefer to make more money vs less. So if they are billing hourly, then yes they all do want to spend more time. Now, they might fight against that urge (E.g. believing that spending less time on Client A will improve their reputation and lead to more clients) but your statement is naive re how incentives work
      - enraged_camel 9y ago
        Just because you bill a client hourly doesn't mean it's in your best interest to drag things on. This is true across all professions, not just legal. The only thing hourly billing does is shift the risk to the client.
      - gamblor956 9y ago
        Lawyers in criminal cases generally work on a fixed fee basis, so working needless hours on one client means less work they can do on other clients. Celebrity lawyers charge hourly, but that is because their clients are so much more demanding that they generally only work on a single client's case at a time. Lawyers in tort cases bill on a contingency basis, so working more does not change their payout--success is all that matters. Lawyers in transactional cases usually bill hourly, because when you're talking about multi-million or multi-billion dollar transactions, the few thousand you spend on the lawyers and accountants is a rounding error compared to what you spend on the airfare for the executives negotiating the deal.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    You can’t change the underlying economics of a market by changing your billing model. All the billing model does is change the risk allocation between the parties. Court cases take a long time because each judge handles hundreds of cases (and civil cases take a back seat to criminal cases). Briefing on a motion, for example, might be done over a few weeks. Then the parties just sit and wait possibly for months for a decision. Trial calanders are booked years in advance.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      How long has this been the case? Was it ever thus?
    - bob_theslob646 9y ago
      Maybe not in the legal field, but the counter example is online advertising (ppc). The better question is why are there not more judges? Everything is also bound by time.Unfortunately in the legal system there is just no incentive to go fast.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        Ad agencies generally use a variety of fee structures: https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/advertising-agency-fee-structures-4029.html https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/advertising-agency-fee-st.... If you step back one level of abstraction, I'm not sure pay-per-click nets advertises more ad revenue than other billing models would, it's just an easy way to calculate things. And in the legal field, fixed fee or hybrid fee structures are very common. In practice, those options aren't cheaper than just negotiating for a discount on hourly rates; they just allocate the risks over/under-estimation differently. Also, plaintiffs have huge incentives to move cases along quickly, because very often some or all of their compensation is tied to the outcome. But cases with contingency lawyers who aren't getting paid until the client gets paid don't move any more quickly than other kinds of cases. As for why there are not more judges: what do you think of this proposal to create a whole bunch of new judgeships? https://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/calabresi-court-packing-memo.pdf https://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/calabre....
  - hobbyjogger 9y ago
    The lawyers in this specific case work for a non-profit (Institute for Justice) that did not bill Järlström a single dollar. http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-16-years-running/ http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-...
mikepurvis 9y ago
He's probably just done with the whole thing at this point, but I suppose he'd have to counter-sue to recover the money? You'd think it would be an easy case— he was unfairly attacked and incurred costs as a result, therefore the entity doing the attacking needs to pony up.
- xigency 9y ago
  The suit isn't about money. It's about having the law removed as being unconstitutional.
  - mikepurvis 9y ago
    Right, and he "won" in the sense that they apologized for at least this particular instance and refunded the fine. But the GP is saying that it's really a loss because of all the time and money he had to spend fighting it, which I'm saying could probably be recovered with a lawsuit of his own.
tantalor 9y ago
Unsurprisingly, exceeding one's authority is not a crime.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  It's ludicrous that the word "engineer" was defined to be considered "authority". If you understand the nuances of a subject, you likely want to explain why you do, so that your thoughts aren't totally disregarded. The problem is that the state wanted to disregard his (or anyone's) thoughts, so they defined "engineer" to carry authority, and levied a fine for anyone who sought to use the word. This is a reasonable thing to do for professions like Medical Doctor, or EMT, where your title demands specific education. It is not reasonable for ambiguous words like "engineer".
ajmurmann 9y ago
Most annoyingly, as someone who lives in Oregon I don't want to pay for this. I certainly want the poor guy who tried to fix something broken to be hugely compensated. However, I want whoever did this to pay for it. I also want then to stop focusing traffic tickets on speeding and instead fine people who cause traffic jams by not accelerating when entering the freeway or go unnecessary slow. But well that's of course never gonna happen and probably most native Oregonians would be fine constantly because they drive insanely slow...
- uniformlyrandom 9y ago
  > most native Oregonians would be fine constantly because they drive insanely slow And this is why they do not want you to drive slow. The difference of speed between cars is what causes accidents. This is why speed limits are raised based on 90th percentile speeds. And this is why everyone in California drives 80 in 65, and CHP are apparently OK with that.
  - flyinghamster 9y ago
    75-80 in a 65 (or even 55) is common in the Chicago area too, except in traffic jams. If you're not going at least 70 when you merge onto the highway, you're gonna get run down. I think the cops are fine with it, since it provides a perfect pretext for a traffic stop if they want you for some other reason.
    - briffle 9y ago
      Chicago's freeways have two speeds, 35 and 80, and they switch between the two in 100 yards or less..
  - davidgay 9y ago
    > The difference of speed between cars is what causes accidents. A cause, but most definitely not the cause. There's the not-so-trivial factors of reaction time (separation / speed) and breaking distance (proportional to the square of the speed) too. And many other factors too, of course.
manyxcxi 9y ago
Some of the original articles (that I’m too lazy to dig up and cite) stated that Oregon was telling him not to SAY that he was an engineer in his correspondence with them and in media portrayals because it’s a licensed profession. At some point people started reporting about how the state has basically used this licensing requirement as a way to gag people from publicly disclosing any kind of ‘technical’ information, and that’s where people started really jumping on board with his case. Kudos to him for sticking it through. Hopefully it leads to a change in our traffic laws AND our laws regarding ‘technical’ information and engineering licensing. A HUGE F you to the state/county/city beaureacrats and lawyers that just pissed away tens (or more) of thousands of dollars just because they could.
- jnordwick 9y ago
  https://reason.com/blog/2017/12/07/licensing-board-admits-they-cant-silence https://reason.com/blog/2017/12/07/licensing-board-admits-th...
- trhway 9y ago
  >Oregon was telling him not to SAY that he was an engineer in his correspondence with them and in media portrayals because it’s a licensed profession. according to Oregon's own gov website the licensed profession is "Professional Engineer". Seems like a similar difference between Registered Nurse and just a nurse. http://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/obtaining/Pages/default.aspx http://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/obtaining/Pages/default.aspx
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > Seems like a similar difference between Registered Nurse and just a nurse. That is a distinction that was invented by the state. Calling yourself an "engineer" is unspecific, and is not a claim to authority, but to knowledge. To claim that it is suddenly a specific claim to authority is to redefine the term. When you redefine a common term, and punish someone for not knowing you did so, that is a real problem. In this case, that was simply done to delegitimize him, which is clearly malicious.
hobbyjogger 9y ago
> force you to pay thousands to lawyers From the article: > but Järlström and his attorneys from the Institute for Justice IFJ is a non-profit (that has received Charity Navigator's 4-star rating for 16 years in a row)[1]. That's not to say that what Oregon has done here is right (not by any means) but Järlström surely hasn't paid IFJ anything. [1] http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-16-years-running/ http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-...

zitterbewegung 9y ago

The best tool in any court case is time.

bob_theslob646 9y ago
Seriously, this. It is such bs, since most lawyers are incentivized to take as much time as necessary since they work on an hourly basis.
- vermontdevil 9y ago
  Umm no. Not all lawyers. They do take time because they want to win. And sometimes they have to be sure as some cases can be complicated.
  - bigchewy 9y ago
    Ummm unless lawyers somehow have evolved different brains than the rest of us, they, too, prefer to make more money vs less. So if they are billing hourly, then yes they all do want to spend more time. Now, they might fight against that urge (E.g. believing that spending less time on Client A will improve their reputation and lead to more clients) but your statement is naive re how incentives work
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      Just because you bill a client hourly doesn't mean it's in your best interest to drag things on. This is true across all professions, not just legal. The only thing hourly billing does is shift the risk to the client.
    - gamblor956 9y ago
      Lawyers in criminal cases generally work on a fixed fee basis, so working needless hours on one client means less work they can do on other clients. Celebrity lawyers charge hourly, but that is because their clients are so much more demanding that they generally only work on a single client's case at a time. Lawyers in tort cases bill on a contingency basis, so working more does not change their payout--success is all that matters. Lawyers in transactional cases usually bill hourly, because when you're talking about multi-million or multi-billion dollar transactions, the few thousand you spend on the lawyers and accountants is a rounding error compared to what you spend on the airfare for the executives negotiating the deal.
- rayiner 9y ago
  You can’t change the underlying economics of a market by changing your billing model. All the billing model does is change the risk allocation between the parties. Court cases take a long time because each judge handles hundreds of cases (and civil cases take a back seat to criminal cases). Briefing on a motion, for example, might be done over a few weeks. Then the parties just sit and wait possibly for months for a decision. Trial calanders are booked years in advance.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    How long has this been the case? Was it ever thus?
  - bob_theslob646 9y ago
    Maybe not in the legal field, but the counter example is online advertising (ppc). The better question is why are there not more judges? Everything is also bound by time.Unfortunately in the legal system there is just no incentive to go fast.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Ad agencies generally use a variety of fee structures: https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/advertising-agency-fee-structures-4029.html https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/advertising-agency-fee-st.... If you step back one level of abstraction, I'm not sure pay-per-click nets advertises more ad revenue than other billing models would, it's just an easy way to calculate things. And in the legal field, fixed fee or hybrid fee structures are very common. In practice, those options aren't cheaper than just negotiating for a discount on hourly rates; they just allocate the risks over/under-estimation differently. Also, plaintiffs have huge incentives to move cases along quickly, because very often some or all of their compensation is tied to the outcome. But cases with contingency lawyers who aren't getting paid until the client gets paid don't move any more quickly than other kinds of cases. As for why there are not more judges: what do you think of this proposal to create a whole bunch of new judgeships? https://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/calabresi-court-packing-memo.pdf https://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/calabre....
- hobbyjogger 9y ago
  The lawyers in this specific case work for a non-profit (Institute for Justice) that did not bill Järlström a single dollar. http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-16-years-running/ http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-...

mikepurvis 9y ago

He's probably just done with the whole thing at this point, but I suppose he'd have to counter-sue to recover the money? You'd think it would be an easy case— he was unfairly attacked and incurred costs as a result, therefore the entity doing the attacking needs to pony up.

xigency 9y ago
The suit isn't about money. It's about having the law removed as being unconstitutional.
- mikepurvis 9y ago
  Right, and he "won" in the sense that they apologized for at least this particular instance and refunded the fine. But the GP is saying that it's really a loss because of all the time and money he had to spend fighting it, which I'm saying could probably be recovered with a lawsuit of his own.

tantalor 9y ago

Unsurprisingly, exceeding one's authority is not a crime.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
It's ludicrous that the word "engineer" was defined to be considered "authority". If you understand the nuances of a subject, you likely want to explain why you do, so that your thoughts aren't totally disregarded. The problem is that the state wanted to disregard his (or anyone's) thoughts, so they defined "engineer" to carry authority, and levied a fine for anyone who sought to use the word. This is a reasonable thing to do for professions like Medical Doctor, or EMT, where your title demands specific education. It is not reasonable for ambiguous words like "engineer".

ajmurmann 9y ago

Most annoyingly, as someone who lives in Oregon I don't want to pay for this. I certainly want the poor guy who tried to fix something broken to be hugely compensated. However, I want whoever did this to pay for it. I also want then to stop focusing traffic tickets on speeding and instead fine people who cause traffic jams by not accelerating when entering the freeway or go unnecessary slow. But well that's of course never gonna happen and probably most native Oregonians would be fine constantly because they drive insanely slow...

uniformlyrandom 9y ago
> most native Oregonians would be fine constantly because they drive insanely slow And this is why they do not want you to drive slow. The difference of speed between cars is what causes accidents. This is why speed limits are raised based on 90th percentile speeds. And this is why everyone in California drives 80 in 65, and CHP are apparently OK with that.
- flyinghamster 9y ago
  75-80 in a 65 (or even 55) is common in the Chicago area too, except in traffic jams. If you're not going at least 70 when you merge onto the highway, you're gonna get run down. I think the cops are fine with it, since it provides a perfect pretext for a traffic stop if they want you for some other reason.
  - briffle 9y ago
    Chicago's freeways have two speeds, 35 and 80, and they switch between the two in 100 yards or less..
- davidgay 9y ago
  > The difference of speed between cars is what causes accidents. A cause, but most definitely not the cause. There's the not-so-trivial factors of reaction time (separation / speed) and breaking distance (proportional to the square of the speed) too. And many other factors too, of course.

manyxcxi 9y ago

Some of the original articles (that I’m too lazy to dig up and cite) stated that Oregon was telling him not to SAY that he was an engineer in his correspondence with them and in media portrayals because it’s a licensed profession. At some point people started reporting about how the state has basically used this licensing requirement as a way to gag people from publicly disclosing any kind of ‘technical’ information, and that’s where people started really jumping on board with his case. Kudos to him for sticking it through. Hopefully it leads to a change in our traffic laws AND our laws regarding ‘technical’ information and engineering licensing. A HUGE F you to the state/county/city beaureacrats and lawyers that just pissed away tens (or more) of thousands of dollars just because they could.

jnordwick 9y ago
https://reason.com/blog/2017/12/07/licensing-board-admits-they-cant-silence https://reason.com/blog/2017/12/07/licensing-board-admits-th...
trhway 9y ago
>Oregon was telling him not to SAY that he was an engineer in his correspondence with them and in media portrayals because it’s a licensed profession. according to Oregon's own gov website the licensed profession is "Professional Engineer". Seems like a similar difference between Registered Nurse and just a nurse. http://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/obtaining/Pages/default.aspx http://www.oregon.gov/osbeels/obtaining/Pages/default.aspx
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > Seems like a similar difference between Registered Nurse and just a nurse. That is a distinction that was invented by the state. Calling yourself an "engineer" is unspecific, and is not a claim to authority, but to knowledge. To claim that it is suddenly a specific claim to authority is to redefine the term. When you redefine a common term, and punish someone for not knowing you did so, that is a real problem. In this case, that was simply done to delegitimize him, which is clearly malicious.

hobbyjogger 9y ago

> force you to pay thousands to lawyers From the article: > but Järlström and his attorneys from the Institute for Justice IFJ is a non-profit (that has received Charity Navigator's 4-star rating for 16 years in a row)[1]. That's not to say that what Oregon has done here is right (not by any means) but Järlström surely hasn't paid IFJ anything. [1] http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-16-years-running/ http://ij.org/ij-receives-charity-navigators-highest-rating-...