Oregon's lawyers are required to take 45 hours of continuing legal education ("CLE") courses every three years in order to renew their law licenses. The Oregon State Bar, the American Bar Association, the law schools, and several private companies offer CLE courses, ranging from one-hour brown bag lunches to three-day seminars out of town. For lawyers with large expense accounts the ones in San Diego and Honolulu are popular in the winter.
Of the 45 hours, five must be on legal ethics and one must be on the lawyer's statutory duty to report child abuse. A few years ago, the Bar added a requirement that three of the CLE hours (i.e., the equivalent of one hour per year) be in "programs accredited for the elimination of bias." (See MCLE Rule 3.2, here in Word and here in PDF.) To be accredited for the elimination of bias, a program must satisfy this requirement:
In order to be accredited as an activity pertaining to the elimination of bias under Rule 3.2(b), an activity shall be directly related to the practice of law and designed to educate attorneys to identify and eliminate from the legal profession and from the practice of law, biases against persons because of race, gender, economic status, creed, color, religion, national origin, disability, age or sexual orientation.
Many attorneys were unhappy when the Bar imposed this requirement, and several of them asked the Bar to hold a vote of the members on whether, not to remove this requirement altogether, but to provide that the Bar could not suspend or discipline a member for not satisfying the requirement to take courses on the elimination of bias. The vote, which is advisory only, ends this Friday, and the Oregon State Bar (which is a state agency, not a private association like the American Bar Association) should release the results early next week. Lawyers are having a lively debate about the vote. One lawyer suggested that as everyone, not just lawyers, should seek to eliminate bias, the requirement to take the courses should be passed over to DMV to enforce: no course, no driver's license. Others say that eliminating the requirement would send a bad message to minorities and disabled persons.
Most lawyers expect that "Yes" will win, meaning that Oregon lawyers want the supreme court to not enforce the requirement. So far the general press has ignored the question, but that will change after the Bar announces the vote next week. And some of the lawyers who have posted candid comments on the Bar's members-only message board may discover that, as the Bar is a state agency, it's subject to the Oregon public records law, and their clients might get to read their comments.