Brickbat: Dog Gone

German ShepherdOfficials in Hangzhou, China, are cracking down on dogs. Owners have been banned from walking their dogs between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Meanwhile, officials have also issued a list of 34 banned breeds, including German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Pit Bull Terriers and Akitas. Video shows police beating and drowning dogs from those breeds as well as strays that they have caught.

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D.C. Police Bragged About Busting an ‘Illegal Narcotics Pop-Up Operation.’ Or As You Might Call It, Some People Selling Weed.

The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is “#HeretoHelp” by busting an “illegal narcotics pop-up operation.” Sounds ominous, until you realize it just means they kept some weed off the streets of D.C., where pot is legal for recreational use anyway.

The story starts with a December 18 post from the department’s Twitter page. I missed it at the time, or else I would have included it in my roundup of the worst overreactions to weed in 2018. As you can see from their photos of what they confiscated, their big haul consisted of various marijuana-related items, including bags of weed, edibles (like cupcakes and lollipops), and paraphernalia:

I could write at length about how pointless it is spending time and resources to bust some weed dealers and then boast about it on social media. But plenty of Twitter users picked up on the problem without my help:

Some users claimed the people running the “narcotics operation” actually give back to the community by providing food and Christmas trees to homeless veterans and needy families, respectively:

Reason was unable to independently identify who runs the operation and what sort of charitable activities they engage in. Either way, the police’s actions are ridiculous.

Thanks to Initiative 71, passed in 2014, people over the age of 21 in D.C. can legally possess, consume, share, and grow limited amounts of marijuana. They just can’t sell it, as the district has no retail recreational pot system. Weed entrepeneurs get around this by selling everyday items for much more than they’re worth and adding the weed as a “gift.” There are other loopholes as well: Sellers can offer pot for free while highlighting the suggested donation, or consumers can pay for admission to pop-up events featuring (you guessed it) weed.

This is all legal in theory. But the law is significantly vague to the point where different parties interpret it the way they want. As a result, people running marijuana operations can never really know when law enforcement is going to crack down.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that D.C. voters decided a long time ago they have no problem with legal weed. The authorities should respect that. If they don’t want there to be a grey market for marijuana, then they should let the legal alternatives flow.

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New York City Greets the New Year With a Host of New Nanny-State Rules

New Yorkers began 2019 with a little less freedom than they had at the end of 2018, thanks to a raft of new laws targeting everything from selling cigarettes in pharmacies to drinking your coffee out of a foam cup.

Let’s start with the cigarettes.

As part of an anti-smoking package passed in 2017, New York City adopted a rule that prohibits both drug stores and grocers with pharmacy sections from selling tobacco products of any kind. That law goes into effect this month.

“The tobacco-free pharmacy law is a public health victory,” argues the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot. “It builds on New York City’s commitment to reduce the number of smokers in our city so New Yorkers can live longer, healthier lives.”

That prior commitment Barbot references include bans on smoking (and vaping) in public housing, bars, restaurants, offices, and city parks. The city also has some of the highest tobacco taxes in the nation, and since June of last year it has set a minimum price of $13 for a pack of cigarettes.

A proposed, but failed, piece of city legislation from 2017 would have even banned people from smoking while walking.

The march of anti-smoking legislation has coincided with a fall in the rate of adults smoking. In 2011, some 16 percent of New Yorkers smoked, compared to 19 percent of Americans as whole. In 2016, that rate had fallen to 11 percent in New York City, and 15 percent nationally. How much of that decline is the result of anti-smoking legislation is an open question.

What is not an open question is that New York’s tobacco taxes and minimum prices have led to a thriving black market. According to one estimate from the Tax Foundation, 56 percent of cigarettes consumed in New York state are smuggled in from lower-taxed jurisdictions.

That suggests that plenty of the city’s smokers are not quitting their habit so much as spending more time and money satisfying it. Chances are good a ban on pharmacy sales will have a similiar effect, forcing smokers to go out of their way to buy cigarettes but not fundamentally changing their desire to smoke.

Unfortunately, going out of your way to buy cigarettes—or anything else—will also probably cost more, thanks to a new fee on Uber and Lyft rides.

Last year the state legislature approved a $2.75 surcharge on all individual rides performed by ridesharing services in central and lower Manhattan. Traditional cab rides are hit with a $2.50 fee, while pooled rides taken on services like Uber Pool and Lyft Line will see an additional $.75 charge. The fees are supposed to reduce congestion on city streets, with the revenue generated earmarked for funding New York City’s public transit system.

Congestion pricing—in which drivers are charged a fee for the road space they take up—is not necessarily a bad idea. But the fact that New York’s law selectively applies them to for-hire rides and charges a slightly lower rate to cabs diminishes its effectiveness at combating traffic. It also puts a heavier burden on one specific, politically disfavored type of transportation that New Yorkers had been increasingly adopting as an alternative to traditional public transit and yellow cabs.

The new fee was supposed to take effect on January 1, but has been held up thanks to a legal challenge from cab drivers.

Fortunately for the city’s nannies, another petty piece of legislation held up for a legal challenge has finally got court-approval to go into effect: a ban on polystyrene foam containers.

This ban has its origins in a 2013 law that banned all such foam containers deemed unrecyclable. In late 2014, the city’s sanitation commissioner ruled there was no possible way polystyrene materials could be recycled, meaning the stuff had to go.

The decision was quickly greeted with a lawsuit from restaurants that depend on the cheap foam containers. They argued that polystyrene was indeed recyclable. The courts ultimately rejected this challenge in June 2018, allowing the city’s prohibition on everything from foam coffee cups to packaging peanuts to go into effect at the start of 2019. Fines for selling, distributing, or even possessing banned foam items range from $250 to $1,000, depending on the number of offenses.

Restaurants will have the next six months to come into compliance with the new law. But the additional costs of purchasing non-polystyrene products will raise costs for some businesses and may kill off some on the margins.

Increasing prices and decreasing choices are the common threads running through all these new rules. And while New Yorkers—and residents of large American cities in general—are no strangers to petty nanny-state impositions, these restrictions diminish one of the primary benefits of living in cities: an abundance of choice and convenience.

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Rand Paul Downplays His Influence on President Trump

In a phone press conference today dedicated to decrying new Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s op-ed attacking President Donald Trump’s character, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) also downplayed reports that he, Paul, was a prime influence on some of Trump’s policies.

“I look at it slightly differently,” Paul said. “It’s not so much me influencing him as that I tend to agree with his policies.” When it comes to Paul’s credited influence on Trump’s stated desire to unwind aspects of American military involvement overseas, the senator said, Trump “expressed himself the same way throughout his campaign.”

Paul also refused to identify himself as a prime influence when it comes to criminal justice reform, arguing that both presidential advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump himself believe that “people have been unfairly in prison for decade after decade, many of them minorities, and we need to have a better way,” again declaring that “it’s not so much me pushing [Trump] in one direction as that we see eye-to-eye” on those policies.

As for Romney, Paul argues that for senators in the president’s own party to attack Trump’s character is “not useful” and can harm “any ability to work together in the Senate to get things done.” While stating that he, Paul, according to his voting record has “opposed the president more than any other Republican in the Senate” (and singling out tariffs as a prime area of disagreement with Trump), he believes other senators should emulate him in treating Trump “with dignity and with respect.”

When a questioner confronted him with Trump’s tendency to insult and name-call, Paul said that while he doesn’t want to say “I give the president a pass” on such behavior, he thinks it is “more important to look at what we have in common, policy-wise, legislation-wise, what we can get accomplished” and that it doesn’t “serve any purpose other than gratifying oneself to criticize the president’s character.”

Paul says politics should be the art of looking for agreement, and that—unlike differences on policy, where common ground can be found on other issues and opinions can shift—”disagreement on character is not fixable” and “if you say someone has terrible character, you can’t say next week their character has changed.”

Paul said he doesn’t think many other senators agree with Romney’s critiques of Trump, which Paul wrote off as unproductive “virtue signaling.” Paul stressed how much the president campaigned for and helped other Republican senators, and compared the Never-Trump movement that he sees Romney as identifying himself with to the hawkish neocons who also attacked Ronald Reagan for negotiating with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Paul suggests it would be more productive for Republicans in the legislature to focus on the parts of Trump’s policies he sees as positive, such as tax cuts, criminal justice reform, regulatory reform, and Supreme Court justices who are “libertarian-leaning and conservative.”

Asked about the possibility that Romney intends to run against Trump in 2020, Paul pointed out that Trump was able to win some states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, that Romney was not. (Romney did, however, get a larger percentage of the national popular vote in 2012, at 47.2 percent, than Trump did in 2016, with 46.1 percent.) Paul wrote off Romney in general as standing for a sort of “establishment big government Republicanism” that is “not popular enough to win a general election.”

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Are We About to See a Wave of Police Using ‘Victim’s Rights’ Laws to Keep Conduct Secret?

SecretYet again, a cop has invoked a law intended to shield the privacy of crime victims to keep his name from being released after he killed a suspect.

At the end of November, a Pennington County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Matthew John Lorenzen, 19, of Rapid City, South Dakota. According to police reports, Lorenzen led deputies on a chase and allegedly shot at them. Lorenzen then rolled his SUV into a ditch and, according to the sheriff’s department, exited his vehicle holding the weapon, which prompted the deputy to shoot him.

The shooting is under investigation, and the deputy is on paid administrative leave. That deputy has also invoked privacy protections under what’s known as “Marsy’s Law” in order to prevent his name from being publicly released.

Marsy’s Law is a “victims’ rights” measure passed by South Dakota voters in 2016. Among many other things, it allows victims of crimes to control whether or not information about themselves gets publicly released. But the law is vague about who exactly is a crime victim. This deputy says he qualifies because Lorenzen reportedly shot at him.

A highway patrol officer in South Dakota did the same trick back in October. And officers in North Dakota, which has its own Marsy’s Law, have pulled a similar move. Even though these cops are on the job working for the public, they’re using this law to hide their own identities from the public.

Needless to say, that isn’t what these laws are supposed to be for. But this misuse is one of several problems with these laws, which are spreading from state to state. Six were approved by ballot initiatives this past November in Florida, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Pennsylvania may pass one this year.

The law is named after Marsalee Nicholas, the sister of California billionaire Henry Nicholas. Marsalee was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 1983, and Henry has been bankrolling efforts to introduce these laws across the country. They’re complicated regulations—the original version passed in California in 2008 defines 17 “rights” for victims of crime. They are partly intended to keep crime victims in the loop and potentially involved in decisions about sentencing of defendants.

These laws also have some components where people identified as victims have control over being interviewed or deposed in these cases and control over the public release of information. That crime victims can have the power to withhold information and refuse interviews in criminal cases is big concern in itself, at least for those of us who want to make sure that defense attorneys are adequately able to access what they need to defend their clients. That part of these bills treats defendants as though they’re guilty before they’ve even been convicted.

But once police officers are able to start invoking Marsy’s Law while doing their job, we’re going to see some even bigger problems. These laws do not even state what types of crimes one must be a victim of to invoke the law. So far we’ve only seen cops use it in cases of fatal shootings, but in theory, if this interpretation stands, an officer could claim to be a “victim” of somebody accused of resisting arrest. There could be some serious consequences down the line for the ability of attorneys (both the prosecution and the defense) and even within police departments in trying to investigate cases that involve violence either by or against police officers.

As the American Civil Liberties Union points out:

If police are considered victims under Marsy’s Law every time they are involved in a police shooting, a hostile arrest, or similar situation, officers would have the right to withhold their name from the public and avoid answering questions from the press or, even more disconcerting, from defense counsel. Given the sweeping right to refuse an interview, it’s worth considering whether Marsy’s Law could be invoked by an officer to refuse an interview by their own internal affairs investigators.

Our objections to this interpretation of victims’ rights goes beyond the ACLU’s previously stated concerns about granting victims a constitutional right to refuse discovery requests. Enabling police to withhold information from defendants and defense counsels could strike an even greater blow to a defendant’s constitutional right to see evidence that could prove the defendant’s innocence.

Moreover, it is exactly in situations of police violence that the public interest in transparency is the most heightened….When they are involved in arrests, shootings, or other law enforcement activities, they are doing so on behalf of the taxpayer and using taxpayer money. There are different expectations of transparency and public access to information.

It’s hard enough to hold police accountable. Many union rules already give police special protections that control the timeframe of interviews while their behavior is being investigated. We need less secrecy surrounding police conduct in violent encounters, not more.

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The Number of Men in Federal Prison for Viewing or Sharing Child Pornography Has Nearly Septupled Since 2004

The number of child pornography offenders in federal prison has nearly septupled since 2004, and most are serving mandatory sentences of five years or more, generally for crimes that did not involve assault or sexual abuse. In fiscal year 2016, for example, 1,565 people were sentenced for possessing, receiving, or distributing child pornography, but only 80 (5 percent) were also convicted of production or another form of sexual abuse. The average sentence was more than eight years.

Those numbers come from a report published today by the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), which says 8,508 federal prisoners were serving time for child pornography offenses in FY 2016, up from 1,259 in FY 2004. The report shows that federal courts continue to impose lengthy prison sentences on people whose offenses may have consisted of nothing more than looking at or sharing pictures of other people’s crimes. Judges often have no choice, since Congress has established a five-year mandatory minimum for receiving or distributing child pornography, which rises to 15 years for defendants who have previously been convicted of specified sexual offenses. In FY 2016, 58 percent of child pornography offenders received mandatory minimums.

When judges have discretion, they typically use it to impose sentences shorter than those recommended by federal guidelines. “In fiscal year 2016,” the USSC reports, “only 26.8 percent of all child pornography offenders were sentenced within the guideline range, compared to 46.6 percent of offenders overall and 41.4 percent of offenders convicted of an offense carrying any mandatory minimum penalty.” That pattern, which is consistent with data for the last decade or so, indicates that federal judges view the current sentencing scheme as excessively harsh, a complaint some of them have publicly voiced. A 2010 USSC survey found that that 71 percent of federal judges thought the mandatory minimums for child porngraphy offenses were too long, while 70 percent said the same thing about guideline sentences.

Some aspects of these sentences defy rationale explanation. “Although Commission analysis has demonstrated that there is little meaningful distinction between the conduct involved in receipt and possession offenses,” the USSC notes, “the average sentence for offenders convicted of a receipt offense, which carries a five-year mandatory minimum penalty, is substantially longer than the average sentence for offenders convicted of a possession offense, which carries no mandatory minimum penalty.” In FY 2016, the average sentence for people convicted of receiving child pornography (excluding those convicted of prior sex offenses) was 85 months, more than 50 percent longer than the 55-month average for people convicted of possessing child pornography. The difference lies not in what the defendant did but in how a prosecutor decides to charge him.

That is by no means the only weird result dictated by current sentencing rules. In a 2009 critique of the sentencing guidelines, Troy Stabenow, then an assistant federal public defender in Missouri, showed how a defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years. The comparison, Stabenow said, “demonstrates the absurdity of the system.”

In FY 2016, the average sentence received by federal child pornography offenders, 95 percent of whom were not convicted of contact crimes, was 101 months, which is nearly as long as the average for robbery. The maximum sentence for receiving child pornography, 20 years, is almost as long as the maximum sentence for arson. Violations of 18 USC 1466A, which covers “obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children,” are subject to the same penalties, even when production of the images did not involve any actual children. That’s right: If one person hands another a drawing of children engaged in sexual activity, both can get five to 20 years.

The federal government is restrained compared to some states. Arizona and Florida, for example, have been know to impose life sentences on people caught with child pornography. Something has gone terribly wrong when courts treat looking at images of a crime more severely than committing that crime.

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Stop Pretending the Smithsonian, National Park Closures Are a Crisis

“In shutdown, national parks transform into Wild West—heavily populated and barely supervised,” blares a headline from The Washington Post. “It’s a free-for-all: shutdown brings turmoil to beloved US national parks,” says The Guardian. “National parks getting trashed during government shutdown,” writes HuffPost. The Associated Press says: “Garbage, feces take toll on national parks amid shutdown.” And lest we forget about our beloved museums, the Post sighs, “The Smithsonian and the National Gallery held on as long as they could. They’re closing.”

Sounds like a crisis! But at most it’s an unfortunate nuisance.

Some background: Parts of the federal government have been shut down since December 21 over President Donald Trump’s demands for border wall money. While Trump has already approved about $931 billion of the proposed $1.2 trillion in spending for the fiscal year, funding has lapsed for agencies that rely on the rest. This didn’t automatically mean closures. Thanks to a contingency plan adopted by the National Park Service earlier this year, many national parks remained open for a time, just without the park rangers, maintenance workers, and other staff who’ve been furloughed by the shutdown.

But without those workers, trash has piled up and restrooms have gradually gotten dirtier. As a result, officials have opted to close down Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree National Parks in California, as well as parts of Yosemite.

In D.C., meanwhile, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art remained open using leftover funds that had been previously allocated. That money has since run out, and the Smithsonian announced today that its museums and the National Zoo would be closing. The National Gallery notes at the top of its website that its status after today “is yet to be determined.”

It’s not hard to understand why some people are making a fuss over these closings. This is, after all, one of the more visible effects of the shutdown. That’s because the federal services and employees deemed “essential”—the parts of the government authorized to shoot you, for instance—are still functioning. National parks and the various historical and artistic institutions run by the federal government are classified as “non-essential,” and rightfully so. Without getting into whether these institutions should be privatized (though there’s a good case for that), their current closures largely affect people’s leisure activities and nothing more.

The closures are definitely unfortunate for tourists who planned trips around these parks and/or museums. But even then, there are plenty of privately run institutions that aren’t affected by the government shutdown at all. In D.C. alone, there’s the Phillips Collection, the National Building Museum, and the Newseum. If you’re sad the National Zoo’s Panda Cam is turned off, you can head to YouTube for your fix. Plus, while California may have more national parks than any other state, it also has a sprawling state park system.

Even the supposed “trashing” of the parks isn’t cause for too much concern. The worry largely stems from issues involving litter, dirty bathrooms, and people relieving themselves in the wrong places. Disgusting problems, for sure, but ones that are not hard to remedy once furloughed employees are back on the clock. In the meantime, shutting the parks and not letting the trash pile up any further is the right thing to do.

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Mitt Romney Is Both Right and Wrong: Podcast

||| ReasonThe man whose immigration policies Donald Trump once called “maniacal” and “mean-spirited” has D.C. all in a tizzy with his new #Resistance op-ed, as Robby Soave detailed this morning. So does Mitt Romney have a point? Or is he whitewashing his own contributions to incivil politics and unsound policy?

“Both” is pretty much the conclusion of today’s Reason Podcast, editors’ roundtable edition, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me. And speaking of 2020 speculation, we also discuss Elizabeth Warren, Justin Amash, and (of course!) Dave Barry.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Auld Lang Syne’ by Wooden Shjips is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

Senator-Elect Mitt Romney, Welcome to the Resistance,” by Robby Soave

Mitt Romney Reminds Us That Trump Isn’t as Extreme on Immigration as the 2012 GOP,” by Matt Welch

Consultant in Chief,” by Peter Suderman

House Dems’ Plan to Reopen the Government Probably Won’t Work. Thank Trump,” by Joe Setyon

‘We’ve Moved Off the Five.’ Trump Already Caving on Border Wall Demands. Good for Him,” by Nick Gillespie

The Government Shutdown Shows Congress Is More Incompetent Than Ever,” by Veronique de Rugy

Surprise! Looks Like Elizabeth Warren Is Running for President!” By Joe Setyon

Sen. Warren Has a Plan to Socialize Pharmaceuticals,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Elizabeth Warren Challenges Trump’s Protectionist Tariffs for Not Being Protectionist Enough,” by Eric Boehm

Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Have Big Plans for 2020: They Want to Spend More Money!” by Peter Suderman

The Complex, Childish Identity Politics of Elizabeth Warren’s Native Heritage,” by Nancy Rommelmann

Elizabeth Warren’s Terrible Policy Views Are More Disqualifying Than Her Dubious Ancestry Claims,” by Robby Soave

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Judge Confirms: Oregon Engineer Has a First Amendment Right to Call Himself an Engineer

A federal judge has ruled that the Oregon Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying violated the First Amendment when it tried to fine Mats Järlström—an Oregonian with a degree in engineering and years of experience in the field—for describing himself as “an engineer.”

In a ruling issued Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie F. Beckerman issued a permanent injunction against the board’s enforcement of the relevant rules, which had included trying to fine Järlström $500 for describing himself as an engineer in a non-professional context.

Järlström got on the board’s bad side because he tried to challenge a traffic ticket given to his wife by a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon, in 2013. He challenged the ticket by questioning the timing of the yellow lights at intersections where the cameras had been installed, using knowledge from his degree in electrical engineering and his experience working as an airplane camera mechanic in the Swedish Air Force. His research landed him in the media spotlight—in 2014, he presented his evidence on an episode of 60 Minutes—and earned him an invitation to present his findings at an annual meeting of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, a trade group.

It also got him some unwanted attention from the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying, which said Järlström’s research into red light cameras and their effectiveness amounts to practicing engineering without a license. The board told Järlström that even calling himself an “electronics engineer” and the use of the phrase “I am an engineer” in his letter were enough to “create violations.”

Those regulations and enforcement actions, Beckerman ruled, are unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment. The judge directed the board to remove the definition of “engineer” from its rules and to limit its enforcement to individuals who falsely claim to be a “professional engineer.”

The ruling means that “thousands of Oregon engineers are now free to describe themselves—truthfully—as ‘engineers,’ without fear of government punishment,” says Sam Gedge, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that represented Järlström in the lawsuit against the board.

“The regulation of the title ‘enginneer’ is more burdensome than necessary to protect the public from the unlicensed practice of engineering,” wrote Beckerman. “The record demonstrates that the threat to free expression is not merely hypothetical.”

Indeed, the record is full of overzealous enforcement on the part of the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying. The board investigated a Portland city commissioner in 2014 for publishing a campaign pamphlet that mentioned his background as an “environmental engineer”—even though the commissioner had a bachelor’s degree in environmental and civil engineering from Cornell University, had a master’s degree from MIT’s School of Civil Engineering, and was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The board spent more than a year investigating the commissioner’s background before voting to issue an official “warning” against using the word engineer incorrectly.

In another case, the state board investigated a gubernatorial candidate for using the phrase “I’m an engineer and a problem-solver” in a campaign ad. The candidate in question, Allen Alley, had a degree in engineering from Purdue University and worked as an engineer for Boeing (and, of course, wasn’t trying to lie about his lack of an Oregon-issued license; he was making a freaking campaign ad).

It doesn’t stop there. In 2010, the state board fined a local activist $1,000 for illegally practicing engineering. More specifically, the activist had told the La Pine, Oregon, city council that a proposed power plant would be too loud for nearby residents.

The board once investigated Portland Monthly for running a story that described a young immigrant woman as “an engineer behind Portland’s newest bridge.” The woman in the story did not describe herself as an engineer, but the magazine’s editors had included that description in their headline.

“For years, Oregon’s engineering board has operated as if the First Amendment didn’t apply to it,” Gedge tells Reason. “As the court’s ruling confirms, that could not be more wrong.”

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End Racial Preferences at Colleges? New at Reason

Asian Americans are suing Harvard for illegally discriminating against them.

The lawsuit forced Harvard to release admissions data which reveal that admitted Asian applicants score 22 points higher on the SAT than whites and 63 points higher than blacks.

Harvard admits to using race as a factor in admissions for the sake of diversity. But the school says it does so without any hard quotas or race-based points system—that they merely consider it informally. Past Supreme Courts have allowed that.

But the Asian Americans suing Harvard argue that the university gives them artificially low personality ratings to keep their admissions rate down. They say Harvard treats Asian Americans as “boring little grade grubbers.”

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