Greg Mills, co-owner of Southwest Engineering Concepts is suing the Arizona State Board of Technical Registration after he was fined for calling himself an engineer and working without an engineering license, reports IEEE Spectrum. Mills has three decades of experience as an engineer in the aerospace and tech circles, and has run his own company with his wife for the last 10 years.
“I was aware that I’m not legally allowed to call myself a professional engineer if I’m not,” Mills told IEEE Spectrum. “I’ve been an engineer for many years. To start my business and call myself an engineer, it never occurred to me that it would cause any trouble for anybody.”
This suit echoes a familiar issue we often see in architecture, with licensing boards seeking to police the improper use of professional state-issued titles such as "engineer" or "architect." Same Gegde, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, who works on cases like these told IEEE Spectrum, "Government licensing boards are often aggressive, and they don’t believe that the First Amendment applies to them."
In a 2017 case between the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying and Mats Järlström, a man who simply wrote "I am an engineer" in correspondence, the court ruled that "Oregon illegally infringed on Mats Järlström’s First Amendment rights when it fined the Beaverton man $500" for the "infringment," IEEE Spectrum reports.
It will be interesting to see how these debacles play out as individuals like Mills and Järlström stand up to overreaching charges by licensing and regulation boards across the country.
Oh boy, here we go.
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He should be able to call himself an engineer, it's not a protected term, like the use of "doctor". You can call yourself doctor any way you want, but you can't call yourself an "MD", as it is the protected term.
Oh boy, here we go.
PhD holders get to use the title "doctor".
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