The Oregonian reported last week about the latest mandatory bar kerfuffle. This time, it involves a signed statement published in the Oregon State Bar’s April 2018 house organ, The Oregon State Bar Bulletin. It was signed by the bar’s governing board president, president-elect and its CEO and ran alongside a statement by several so-called special interest and specialty bar associations. You can read both statements here.
According to the news story that ran April 24, 2018 in the state’s largest newspaper, “Two signed statements in the latest Oregon State Bar bulletin – one by the bar condemning speech that incites violence and the other by non-bar specialty groups decrying the rise of the white nationalist movement under President Trump — have drawn fire from some lawyers aghast that the bar would allow such political statements.” The ABA Journal also has a story at “Statements by Oregon State Bar and specialty groups draw fire.”
Playing politics and ideology with mandatory monies.
Mandatory bar associations like having it both ways. In mandatory bar states like Oregon, these associations force lawyers to join and fund their activities as a precondition of earning a living. U.S. Supreme Court case-law, however, imposes certain restrictions on these forced-membership associations. They can constitutionally fund activities out of the mandatory dues of all members only if the activities are germane to the goals of regulating the legal profession and improving the quality of legal services.
But being masters of the self-serving, parsed interpretation, the associations generally have a field day gumbifying those goals into loopholes large enough to drive a dump truck through. This is why the temptation remains strong to use mandatory dues to fund activities even if they’re not germane to those regulatory and quality improvement goals, including those of an ideological or political nature. In the rare instances when they’re caught being political or ideological, they solely get to calculate the pittance refunded to objecting members.
Is it any wonder mandatory bars can’t resist their unaccountable access to and nontransparent use of mandatory dues to take positions on public policy matters — even controversial ones? Supreme Court restrictions or not, they depend on every cent of those mandatory member monies even while taking the latitude enjoyed by voluntary bar associations to weigh in on public policy.
Unlike mandatory bars, voluntary bars are free of First Amendment and Keller v. State Bar of California restrictions and can therefore comment and even advocate on political or ideological concerns. However, if members don’t like a position that a voluntary bar association takes, they aren’t forced to remain members.
This, then, is the crux of the mandatory bar problem. If members want to earn a living as lawyers — they might qualify for a nickel ninety-five refund if they have the nerve to complain about non-germane dues use — but they can’t get out.
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Credits: Donald Trump caricature by Donkey Hotey at Flickr via Attribution share-alike attribution license.