Not Involved: What Michigan’s Mandatory Bar Fee Actually Buys

The State Bar of Michigan has no role in attorney discipline, by its own account. It doesn’t have the final word on who gets a law license either, only a recommendation a separate board can accept or reject. So what is it that you would say you do here? Every practicing attorney in Michigan pays $415 a year to find out, whether they asked the question or not.

The Union Comparison Isn’t a Stretch

Michigan attorneys who want to practice law in the state do not get to choose whether they belong to the State Bar of Michigan. Membership is mandatory. So are the dues. At a structural level, that arrangement looks a great deal like the agency shop model that used to govern public-sector unions: a person wants to do a job, the state requires them to belong to an organization and pay it, and that organization does things, and says things, well beyond simply administering a license.

The dues themselves are not hidden. Under Michigan Supreme Court Administrative Order No. 2022-3, adopted in June 2022, active attorneys pay $415 a year, itemized into three separate buckets.

Of the $415, $260 funds State Bar of Michigan operations. $140 funds the Attorney Discipline System. $15 funds the Client Protection Fund, which reimburses clients when a lawyer steals from them. The 2022 order raised the State Bar’s own portion for the first time since 2003, an increase the Michigan Supreme Court’s order describes as necessary to sustain the organization’s programs and services.

What Keller Actually Allows

The Supreme Court answered the union-comparison question directly in Keller v. State Bar of California in 1990. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Rehnquist held that a state can compel attorneys to join and fund a bar association, but only insofar as the money supports activities germane to regulating the legal profession or improving the quality of legal services. Anything beyond that, ideological or political activity unconnected to those purposes, has to be optional, and the Court borrowed the disclosure and rebate procedures from a union case, Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, to police the line.

Michigan had already built its own version of that test nine years earlier. Falk v. State Bar of Michigan, decided by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1981, addressed the same question under the Michigan Constitution and reached a similar germaneness standard before Keller made it a matter of federal law nationwide. When the 2014 Michigan Supreme Court task force later took up whether the State Bar should remain mandatory, it explicitly framed the question as protecting First Amendment rights consistent with both Keller and Falk, not as new territory.

Janus Pulled a Foundation Stone, Not the Building

Then, in 2018, Janus v. AFSCME changed the ground under public-sector compelled fees generally. The Court held that states and public-sector unions could no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees, and it explicitly overruled Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the 1977 case that had allowed those fees for collective bargaining costs. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito described Abood as resting on reasoning the Court called poorly reasoned.

Janus did not touch Keller by name. Bar association dues were not before the Court. But part of Keller’s own analogy to union fee cases had rested on the same intellectual framework Janus dismantled, and lower courts noticed immediately. The result is a live doctrinal split: Keller remains binding on every court below the Supreme Court, but the reasoning that once supported it is no longer entirely intact.

Michigan Already Had This Fight

Michigan did not have to wait for a hypothetical test case. Lucille Taylor, a longtime Michigan attorney and former counsel to Governor John Engler, filed suit against the State Bar of Michigan in 2019 through the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, arguing that mandatory dues amounted to forced speech after Janus. “When an organization speaks for you without permission, that’s forced speech,” Taylor said at the time. The State Bar rejected the union comparison, describing Michigan’s integrated bar as existing to serve the public and save taxpayer dollars rather than to advocate on members’ behalf.

The Sixth Circuit decided the case, styled Taylor v. Buchanan, in 2021. The court rejected Taylor’s challenge, and Judge Karen Nelson Moore’s majority opinion applied Keller in a straightforward way to uphold Michigan’s mandatory bar. But Judge Amul Thapar wrote separately, and his concurrence is the more consequential part of the opinion. Thapar laid out plainly that Janus had overruled Abood and undercut the reasoning behind part of Keller, even though Keller’s holding survived. He noted that a Michigan attorney could still bring a viable challenge against a bar that spent mandatory dues on nongermane political activity without adequate opt-out procedures. Taylor lost only because she had conceded that the State Bar of Michigan’s spending stayed inside Keller’s germaneness line, leaving no live claim for the court to decide.

The State’s Defense, and Where It Runs Out

Michigan’s argument for keeping the bar mandatory does not rest only on Keller. It rests on a separate, structural claim: attorneys are officers of the court, and the Michigan Supreme Court has independent constitutional authority to regulate the practice of law. On that view, the State Bar functions as part of the Court’s own regulatory apparatus, not as an ordinary voluntary trade association, and mandatory membership is simply how the Court chooses to administer that authority.

That argument explains why Michigan is allowed to require membership. It does not, on its own, explain why membership in the State Bar specifically is what is required, as opposed to compliance with whatever the Michigan Supreme Court’s own disciplinary and licensing bodies impose directly. And on that narrower point, the State Bar of Michigan’s own materials undercut the broadest version of the state’s case. Its website says directly that it plays no part in disciplining the attorneys required to belong to it.

Licensing tells a similar story, just not as clean a version of it. Under Rule 15 of the Michigan Supreme Court’s rules governing the State Bar and the Board of Law Examiners, a State Bar committee does investigate new applicants’ character and fitness first. But that committee only makes a recommendation. The Board of Law Examiners, a separate body the Michigan Supreme Court created, makes the actual admission decision and can accept or reject what the State Bar sends it. The Bar gathers the file. It does not get the final word on whether anyone becomes a lawyer. Ongoing discipline runs through the Attorney Grievance Commission and Attorney Discipline Board, both created directly by the Michigan Supreme Court. The Client Protection Fund, which reimburses clients for stolen money, is administered by a board the State Bar appoints but operates as its own program under Michigan Supreme Court authorization. Add it up and the State Bar touches every one of the state’s core regulatory functions, licensing, discipline, and victim restitution, at the edges. It makes the final call on none of them.

What $260 a Year in Membership Actually Buys

Set the disciplinary portion of the dues aside for a moment. The $260 that funds State Bar of Michigan operations specifically is billed as membership in a professional organization, and the State Bar publishes its own flyer of what that membership includes. Line by line, it is a shorter list than the pitch suggests, and a large share of it is not legal infrastructure at all. It is a corporate discount card a working attorney is required to purchase in order to keep their law license.

How many of the state’s active members actually use any of this is a question the Bar’s own numbers can’t answer, except in one place. Section membership is the single benefit category where a participation number exists at all, and even that number can’t be cleanly converted into a percentage: an attorney who joins four sections counts four times, and an attorney who joins none counts zero. What it can show is scale. Total section enrollments fell from 68,953 in 2015-16 to 47,369 in 2024-25, a 31 percent drop, and the total has held in the 47,000-to-49,000 range every year since 2021-22. Measured against the roughly 42,073 active members the Bar reported in its own 2026 demographics data, that means total section sign-ups now run only about 13 percent above the size of the membership itself, not the multiple you would expect from broad participation once you account for the attorneys stacking two, three, or four sections at once.

What $415 a Year Actually Funds, By the Numbers

The Attorney Grievance Commission and Attorney Discipline Board publish a joint annual report, and the 2024 numbers show exactly how much of the mandatory fee’s disciplinary portion turns into public accountability. The Commission received 2,393 requests for investigation that year, plus nearly 29,000 phone calls. Of 1,832 dispositions completed in 2024, 1,422 were dismissed by the Grievance Administrator alone, without ever reaching the full Commission. Another 205 were closed by the Commission itself. Ninety-two ended in admonishments. Seven ended in contractual probation. Ninety-five were approved for formal complaints, and eleven were approved based on a judgment of conviction.

Sixty-four formal complaints were actually filed with the Attorney Discipline Board in 2024. That is roughly 2.7 percent of the requests for investigation the Commission received that year. The Board issued 80 final discipline orders: 11 disbarments, 7 suspensions of three years or longer, 13 suspensions between 180 days and three years, 21 suspensions under 180 days, and 28 reprimands. Forty-three of those 80 orders, 53 percent, were entered by consent rather than after a contested hearing.

The Transparency Gap

None of this means Michigan’s disciplinary system is doing nothing. It means the system that does the work is not the State Bar, and most of what it does never becomes visible to the public it is meant to protect. Michigan Court Rule 9.126 makes grievance investigations privileged and confidential, and a grievance that does not result in formal charges stays that way unless the attorney under investigation chooses to waive confidentiality. The Grievance Administrator’s office does not confirm or deny that a grievance against a particular attorney exists, and records requests for confidential files are denied on the theory that the disciplinary system functions as part of the judiciary rather than as a public body subject to open-records law.

That structure means a clean-looking public record does not tell a prospective client much. An attorney with zero grievances and an attorney with dozens of grievances that were each dismissed by the Grievance Administrator alone can look identical from the outside, because 1,422 of the 1,832 dispositions issued in 2024 never had to become public at all.

Pending Doesn’t Mean Paused

Separation from the State Bar and detailed aggregate reporting are real, but neither one answers the question that actually matters to someone waiting on a result: does the system stop anything while it works. Under Michigan’s own court rules, the answer for most grievances is no. MCR 9.120(B)(1) automatically suspends an attorney on conviction of a felony. MCR 9.115(H) allows a hearing panel to suspend an attorney who fails to appear despite actual notice, or who claims incapacity. Those are the narrow situations in which Michigan suspends someone before a full hearing. A request for investigation, on its own, is not one of them. Filing a grievance does not restrict what the attorney can keep doing while the Attorney Grievance Commission decides what to do about it, and neither the Commission’s nor the Board’s published annual reporting discloses how long that decision typically takes.

This reporter has waited more than a year on an Attorney Grievance Commission complaint. The conduct that prompted it did not stop when the grievance was filed. It has not stopped since. That is not a gap in this reporting. It is what the rule allows: a disciplinary system built to eventually document misconduct, not to interrupt it while a case is still open.

Why the Question Keeps Resurfacing

Michigan is not an outlier in facing this argument, and it will not be the last state to face it again. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, which represented Taylor, filed an amicus brief in Crowe v. State Bar of Oregon urging the Supreme Court to use that case to revisit Keller in light of Janus. The Court declined, denying certiorari on June 30, 2025, after distributing the petition for conference earlier that month. It was the second time since Janus that the Court had been asked to take up a Keller challenge and declined. Neither denial resolves the underlying tension Thapar identified in 2021. It simply leaves Keller in place until the Supreme Court decides otherwise, in Michigan or anywhere else.

That is the pattern Clutch Justice’s reporting keeps documenting across Michigan’s institutions generally: a structure survives not because the questions about it have been answered, but because no court with the authority to force an answer has been willing to take the case.

What This Actually Comes Down To

The constitutional question was never really in doubt once Taylor conceded the germaneness point. Keller controls. Michigan’s mandatory bar is lawful, and it will stay lawful unless and until the Supreme Court revisits Keller itself, which it has now twice declined to do since Janus reshaped the ground underneath it.

The more useful question is the one Michigan’s own numbers already answer. Admission decisions belong to the Board of Law Examiners, not the committee that investigates the file. Discipline runs through the Attorney Grievance Commission and Attorney Discipline Board, both direct creations of the Michigan Supreme Court. Client restitution runs through a fund with its own governance. The State Bar of Michigan touches all three functions somewhere in the process and controls none of them. Michigan already has its answer to where the actual decisions get made: a set of court-created bodies that operate independently of the organization every attorney is required to join and pay to belong to.

That answer is about org charts, not outcomes. It says nothing about whether the disciplinary system actually protects anyone while a complaint is open, and the rules governing interim suspension say that, most of the time, it does not. Mandatory membership in the State Bar buys none of the state’s core protections. The system that does perform them is real, separately run, and still slow enough that the misconduct it exists to address can keep happening for the entire time a grievance sits in the queue.