For example, if someone owes me money, is it illegal for me to send them a letter, in which I purport to be a lawyer?
1. Medical doctors 2. Certified Public Accountants 3. Lawyers 4. Professional Engineers 5. Realtors
Many other professions and certifying agencies will claim that a certification is necessary to practice, and that you should pay them for the privilege, but these are some of the few that are legally protected.
You need a "Professional Engineer" certificate from the NSPE to sign off on certain documents. But note that these certain documents are only used in certain fields, like civil engineering. This certification is not required to be (or to claim to be) a software engineer, electronics engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, chemical engineer, etc. For example, I've taken many engineering courses, I have a bachelor's of science in engineering degree, and I practice engineering day-to-day without being a professional engineer. In college, perhaps 5% of my graduating class took the PE exam? And now, few of my coworkers, customers, or suppliers are professional engineers - The two individuals that I can think of transferred into the domain out of civil engineering.
The electronics engineer in the article mistakenly stumbled into the territory of civil engineers who are very, very protective of their licensure, and they overreacted IMO. I don't dispute that if he'd claimed to be an NSPE-licensed Professional Engineer, and signed off on documents which are legally required to be approved by a PE, that he'd be deserving of the punishments associated with this fraud (which are much steeper than $500). But the NSPE does not own the generic term "engineer".
It is possible to be a "real estate agent" (the profession) without being a Realtor. There are licensing requirements, which vary by state, to be a real estate agent.
1. Who you send it to 2. The purpose of the communication 3. The consequences of the communication 4. Whether it is inter- or intra-state 5. What profession it is
There are other questions that can factor in, but the general rule is: don't lie.
Lying of any form for personal gain is generally a species of fraud, but pretending to have a professional qualification – even without gain – can also incur consequences.
It's not limited to professional qualifications; some places still observe the crime of jactitation, which is pretending to be married.
"However, it is important to make a distinction between a "graduate engineer" and a "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer." A "graduate engineer" is anyone holding a degree in engineering from an accredited four-year university program, but is not licensed to practice or offer services to the public. Unlicensed engineers usually work as employees for a company, or as professors in engineering colleges, where they are governed under the industrial exemption clause. Some states, such as Ohio and New Jersey, prohibit the use of the term "engineer" by an unlicensed person unless it is part of the internal classification of their employer."
So you don't need a license to call yourself an engineer. What this effectively does is permits engineers to perform engineering tasks and be called engineers in their line of work, without having to complete the examinations and all of that jazz. Otherwise, the entire system makes 0 sense. Furthermore, this demonstrates that you may call yourself an engineer if you have graduated from engineering college as you are under granted the title "graduate engineer", and thus can use engineer for shorthand, just as "engineers in training" and "professional engineers" may call themselves engineers for short. I doubt they want to always have to call themselves professional engineers or engineers in training or face a silly fine.
Though I do fully support requiring licensure for some engineering related work. Basically, if you can fuck something up that can cost lives (aviation, bridges, buildings, etc...), you should have a license. Screwing up some code or mixing industrial chemicals normally doesn't fall into that category, though. If it does then yes you should be licensed.
Meanwhile I'll keep on being an engineer all the live long day :)
By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? But then, what am I doing?
† The law was at least smart enough here to require a partnership structure. Imagine if your fictional lawyer could be "employed by" a real shell corporation!
Wrong. The author of the letter (you) is falsely claiming to be a lawyer. You are also falsely claiming other things, which may or may not have additional consequences.
If so, then would it change anything if I just wrote a letter as myself, saying that I would contact my named, fictitious lawyer and have them draw up a suit against the recipient?
Or, on a completely different (ridiculous) tangent: if a program generates an email claiming that it's a lawyer (not from a template written by a person; from genuine black-box deep-learning text generation, hooked straight up to an email client, without foreknowledge or expectation from the author that this would be the result), has the author of the program committed a crime? I would assume the author in that case more parallels the owner of an animal that did something that would have been a crime if a human did it, but is very blurry without the presumed mens rea humanity brings to the table.
Consider if you change the communication medium from written to oral: if walk up to someone and claim a different name than is actually yours, claim to be a lawyer representing someone else (who you identify with your actual name), and then issue some demands, etc., it's pretty clear that you are claiming to be a lawyer. Changing the medium from oral communication to written doesn't change the essence at all.
I don't think the "walking up to someone" analogy applies, because there's a "me" doing that walking that the person can see, and so by asserting any claim through speech, I'd be attaching the subject of that claim to the person they're seeing—i.e. to myself. But in sending a letter written "as" someone else, there is no "me" from their perspective to attach the claim to. There's only "whoever is named [fake lawyer name]" (nobody) and "whoever sent this letter" (someone else, although I paid them to do it. Coincidentally, if I did have a lawyer, I'd be paying them to do it.)
The letter is a written statement which (whatever else.you may claim in it) is, un fact, from you, asserting various facts, including that the writer of letter is a lawyer.
The claims in the letter are made by the actual author of the letter, not the (potentially fictions) person that they are claiming to be when they wrote it.
> When does a text change from fiction into a claim about reality
When it is presented either with intent that it will be taken as a claim about reality, or when a reasonable person would see it that way. What you write in a novel is an overt work of fiction that no reasonable person, in context, will, in the general case (barring special circumstances), see as a claim of fact. If someone else copies part of it out of context and presents it differently, thats a different story, but has nothing to do with you.
When you send something that you have written to someone with the intent that they view it as what it purports to be on its face, than any knowing falsehoods in it are knowing false claims made by you, the actual person who composed and sent the communication with the intent to deceive.
Architect, Lawyer and Medical Doctor, for sure.
Perhaps predictably, the people complaining about this feel that it's a form of rent-seeking by incumbents, but none of them have bothered to consider the flip side of the equation which is that bad actors who falsely hold themselves out as licensed professionals can hurt would-be clients in two ways: by directly exploiting them for the cost of services which they are not licensed to provide, and by jeopardizing their longer-term interests in a way that might severely impact them in the future.
Obviously this gentleman is not running around trying to scam Oregonians into paying for cut-price engineering work. But publicly asserting that you are licensed to practice a profession without actually being so, especially when licensure is generally easy to obtain, creates the potential for public misunderstanding. The point of the fine is not to impose a serious financial penalty (hence the token amount of %500) but to draw the public's attention to the fact that anyone holding themselves out as an engineer needs to be licensed within the jurisdiction in which they are practicing - and practicing on your own behalf is still practicing and indeed widely considered by professionals as a kind of marketing.
Considering that the annual fee to practice as an engineer in Oregon is only $75, and that engineering is well established as a profession, I don't think his complaints have a whole lot of merit. Last time I looked engineers are required to take ethics classes as part of their education, and in many jurisdictions keeping ones certification up requires a certain number of hours spent in continuing education each year, same as in the medical and legal professions. If you're not actively practicing your profession then you have, legally speaking, retired and should not present yourself as being currently licensed.
Where is he licensed? Why is he not licensed in Oregon, despite having been timely notified, without penalty, of the requirement to do so if he wished to claim that title? Why did he agree to abide by this requirement then break his agreement within months?
The first linked document in the article states that the defendant is not licensed by any state.