Freedom of Speech or Professional Practice

[Patrick Tami]

The U.S. Supreme Court has officially declined to hear two pivotal cases that promised to redefine the line between professional surveying and First Amendment speech. On April 20, 2026, the Court denied the Petitions for Writ of Certiorari for both 24-279 (360 Virtual Drone Services LLC v. Ritter) and 24-276 (Ryan Crownholm v. Moore), leaving lower court rulings in place and effectively ending the litigation.

[Edward M Reading]

This is great news, Pat.

[jamesh1467]

Good for California and North Carolina. Bad for Texas's surveyors and licensed professionals. I would guess the court didn't want to make a nationwide political statement because it's primarily a state's issue. Its just that for over a century, all the states were relatively aligned on how the states would handle it. The precedent in the 5th Circuit will change the law for the states in the 5th Circuit. This, in turn, will force those states to reexamine their professional licensure laws in line with this new legal doctrine.

But the states in the 5th Circuit seem to want it changed. Texas is doing a lot of stuff with attorneys and the bar associations, and some of that. They seem to want to see these professional licenses diminished.

If I were the court, unless I knew I was going to overturn the 5th and set them straight, I would do exactly this, let it play out, see how it goes in Texas, and in a state that is on a political trend of wanting to bend and remove rules for professional licensure. See what they do with it. Then come in and make a statement on the nationwide level to settle the circuit split after you have a trial of how it will go on a nationwide level in a conservative state for a decade or so. Maybe it goes well. Maybe people start dying because we remove doctors' licenses. The court really shouldn't be deciding that type of stuff, and they know it.

Let's all thank god that they know that by denying cert here with some of the other things that have been implied through the courts and the government over the past few years. The fact that it took over a year to do so was very concerning. Hopefully, it was on the side of debating whether to set the 5th Circuit straight by granting cert to overturn their decisions. But I think we all know that the court is very conservative right now, and it was pretty likely being discussed whether they should take the case to confirm some form of what the 5th Circuit was doing and make it nationwide law.

The court is meant to follow the wishes of the people and change laws to reflect what it thinks the people want and will support, not to guide the people toward new laws and political ideas, as the other two branches do. Without a democratic process in their branch of government to really give the people a say in where they should be going with those new political ideas, I might add. They are only supposed to make major changes once its clear those changes would be supported. That's how they keep themselves from becoming over-politicized in a court that is all about politics. Once again, thank god this was denied, and they clearly still understand that.

Its a relatively good play by the court and respects the rights of the states on both sides of the argument. Leave the precedent in place for the states that seem to want the precedent left in place, then allow Texas and some of the southern states to go off on their own and make new laws. But don't make a statement either way for the states that pretty clearly didn't want these changes. Their circuits for those states can change it in the future if they want to do it. Or not. Then they can come back to SCOTUS. Again this court right now is all about states rights. So this lines up pretty well with giving the states the right to choose their own future on professional licensure.

They are going to be making new laws in those southern states, though. And the Institute of Justice will no doubt be bringing new cases to the 5th circuit to make new laws. As well as probably other circuits outside the 4th and the 9th that could potentially be swayed.

SCOTUS basically just sparked the start of a national debate exactly as the original post framed it. Surveying and professional licensure laws just became very secure in every state but a few southern states. But in those southern states, everything about professional licensure laws and the security of those professional licenses just came into question. And if it goes the wrong direction, SCOTUS may not even have to speak again on this issue. The states might change it own their own.

The future of our profession is what we do with it and what happens in those southern states. SCOTUS basically asked us to return once we have a clearer consensus on what the public wants. But very clearly indicated they will potentially overturn liberal state legislatures if there is enough conservative consensus by making a nationwide law by not putting the 5th circuit in check on this, and supporting states' rights fully by saying the courts should stay out of this completely. Also, it was probably going to be a little tough to find a line of reasoning that completely fell in line with the Abortion case without continuing to open the can of worms more on this whole free speech/conduct issue. So why not wait until they are really ready to make a true statement on that issue?

Like always, the future is ours to do with what we want. Exactly as our founders intended. You all just thought I was crazy for seeing it early. But its there. Now, everyone has had a few years to realize that our licenses may not be as secure as we think they are, or have been for the last 100 years, and the stage is set for a real public discussion about these licenses, what role they really serve today, and their purpose in our society.

You have to have a value proposition to the general public to get these incredibly generous market restrictions that we get through our licensing boards. You can't just depend on 100-year-old laws and expect them to never change. The beauty of our government is that our founders gave us a framework to change the laws. Every single law can be changed, no matter how secure you think it is. Yes, the laws that secure our license are so old that it will take a long time or a large amount of political will to remove or change them. But there just has to be enough willingness to change them. There clearly is at least some willingness to remove or diminish the surveying license. So start giving the public a value proposition to keep the survey license. Its really just that simple.


Personally. I thought they weren't going to take 360 Drone and Crownholm. It was too crazy an idea. Those cases wouldn't have had enough of an impact, and it would have been a huge political statement by the court that they aren't supposed to do. The court in the 5th surveying case kept its reasoning fairly narrow and tailored to surveying, so it wouldn't affect much reasoning outside of surveying. But then, when Hines came along, I thought SCOTUS had to speak on the subject. I thought it forced their hand to speak on the subject because some of Hines's reasoning was a little batshit crazy and incredibly open-ended, which could cascade into all kinds of areas of professional licensure. That's now the law in the 5th Circuit. I would be incredibly surprised if the Institute of Justice dropped this. They can do a lot with that Hines precedent.

Anyway. There are my two cents.

[DWoolley]

The Ninth Circuit built a fortress around this profession. The constitutional framework is settled. The statutory boundary is reinforced. No First Amendment challenge, no due process argument, no equal protection theory survived contact with the court. That is an extraordinary legal gift — and the profession should sit with that for a moment before moving on.

Because a fortress only means something if the people inside it are worth defending.

Here is the harder conversation. Over the last twenty years, California land surveyors have lost command of practice fundamentals. Measurement technology has outpaced baseline knowledge across a significant portion of the licensed population. Total stations, GNSS, LiDAR, and AI-assisted feature extraction have automated what once required genuine field judgment, mathematical discipline, and an earned understanding of error propagation, geodetic control, and record conflict resolution. The tools do the work. The license signs the product. That gap — between what the credential implies and what the practitioner actually commands — is not invisible. Allied professions see it. Permitting agencies see it. Legislators who will eventually be asked to revisit scope of practice will see it.

The profession did not build the GPS constellation. It did not develop the inertial measurement unit, the robotic total station, or the photogrammetric processing engine. Those tools were built by the aerospace industry, the defense sector, and the technology economy. The profession adopted them, integrated them into workflows, and now defends an exclusive scope of practice that rests partly on the assumption that the licensed practitioner brings irreplaceable technical judgment to the product. That assumption deserves honest examination — not from outside the profession, but from within it.

Think of a master craftsman who has accumulated more tools than he truly commands. At some point, the honest act — the act that preserves his reputation and the integrity of his bench — is to clear it. Not because he is forced to. Not because a court ordered it. But because he knows the difference between the tools he mastered and the tools he inherited. What remains after the clearing is unimpeachable. What remains is the profession.

That is the argument. Not that the profession should be weakened. That it should be honest. And that honesty is the only sustainable defense of the fortress the Ninth Circuit just finished building.

Over the years, I (and others) have advocated publicly for establishing the LSIT and EIT credential as the minimum floor for field supervisory practice on California projects. The reasoning then was the same as the reasoning now: a license without a knowledge floor is a credential without a foundation. The legal architecture of § 8726 is only as strong as the professional competency it is presumed to certify. If the credential is issuing to practitioners who cannot demonstrate command of the fundamentals — boundary, mathematics, monument perpetuation doctrine, legal description analysis, coordinate geometry from first principles — then the profession is borrowing credibility it has not earned, and spending it on scope of practice arguments it may not be able to sustain indefinitely.

The voluntary response is not retreat. It is consolidation to defensible terrain. Release the lower-complexity measurement activities that do not require irreplaceable professional judgment. Open those activities to the market, to technicians, to other credentialed professionals where appropriate. Concentrate the exclusive scope where it belongs — boundary determination, monument perpetuation, legal description authorship, expert opinion, and the resolution of conflicting record evidence. These are the functions the public cannot replicate with a GIS subscription and a drone. These are the functions that require forty years of accumulated judgment to perform with integrity. These are the functions worth defending.

The Ninth Circuit handed the profession a significant legal victory in Crownholm v. Moore. The next question is not legal. It is cultural. It is whether the profession will meet the standard the court assumed it already held — or whether it will collect the protection, ignore the obligation, and wait for a legislature with less patience to ask the question instead.

The fortress was secured by law. It will stand—or fall—on conduct. A profession that requires enforcement to prove its integrity has already answered the question. What remains is to demonstrate—voluntarily—that the standard holds.

DWoolley

[Jim Frame]

No disagreement from me.