“Moral Turpitude” is a legally ambiguous and antiquated term that could be found in several professional licensing statutes as a basis on which to deny or revoke a person’s professional license. The first definition of the phrase in the current edition of Black’s Law Dictionary is “conduct that is contrary to justice, honesty or morality” – not terribly helpful, and certainly not limiting.
While it has been many years since the General Assembly has enacted a licensing statute using this term, a few dozen statutory provisions contain this standard. Since no person should fear being denied entry to a profession due to this hopelessly vague term, we testified in support of this legislation to eliminate the phrase from those statutes. Positively, this legislation passed and will be signed into law.
