As a lawyer, I must attend 45 hours of “continuing legal education” every three years.  This requirement is administered by the Oregon State Bar.  It divides Oregon's legal community into three groups so that, each  year, about about one third of my colleagues get a slight look of distraction in their eyes because it is their “reporting year.”  This may be an exaggeration on my part; many lawyers are methodical people who regularly attend seminars over their three year reporting period.  But every autumn, some, like me, embark upon a couple of months (for some, weeks; for others, days) of cramming in order to satisfy our licensing requirement.  And yes, this is my reporting year.

So I’ve been doing some freshening up in my primary practice areas of health law, disability law, elder law and nonprofit law.  Part of the fun of doing this is when a presenter talks about new legislation in their field that I had a hand in moving through the legislature.  It’s a good reminder that most laws are created by a small number of people hashing things out in the Capitol in an effort to solve a problem.  How a new law will actually work in the real world is hard to fully predict.  Sometimes it will be the lawyers and judges in the room who are charged with implementing things that seemed to make sense by us advocates and lobbyists.  Sometimes they are not happy about it.

A couple of examples came up today in a seminar on guardianship.  The 2009 legislature passed Senate Bill 16 that allows advance directives for health care to be used to admit a person to a psychiatric ward for treatment of behavior caused by dementia.  Lawmakers also passed House Bill 2137 that allows the Department of Human Services to seek a guardianship for any person it believes needs a guardian to protect her from abuse.  DHS is also permitted to release otherwise confidential information to the court when it seeks a guardianship.

On the advance directive bill, a speaker commented that many users of this document would be shocked to learn that they could be slapped into a psych ward because they had signed something they thought was about end of life decisions.  On the guardianship bill, a speaker said that some judges and court clerks had complained about provisions requiring files to be sealed to maintain privacy.

Maybe they have good points, maybe not.  (I agree with the first critique and am not surprised by the second - any bill that requires someone to do something that they didn't have to do before is likely to annoy them.)  Whatever the merits, these seminars help to publicly raise issues that can be sorted out in legislative sessions to come.  In the case of the advance directive, there is already a work group slated to study how to proceed. 

Some critics of government think that legislatures meet too often and only make mischief.  I'm of the view that citizens should be in constant conversation about our mutually-agreed rules.  There should be ample opportunity to adjust, fine-tune and correct as we go.  In doing so, we have our best shot at self-government, rather than having rules that are ignored or unjustly enforced.  And even, I suppose, if I have to listen up as I scrape together my 45 continuing legal education credits by December 31.