Ronald Edward Durbin II: Oklahoma Attorney Disbarred After 115 Rule Violations, First Amendment Auditing, and a Disciplinary Case the Supreme Court Called Almost in a Class by Itself

Ronald Edward Durbin II: The YouTube “Auditor” Who Turned the Practice of Law Into a Weapon

How a Tulsa attorney spent fifteen years as a licensed practitioner, reinvented himself as a First Amendment crusader, and amassed 115 rule violations on his way to one of the most extraordinary disbarments in Oklahoma history

By The Ethics Reporter Editorial Board

There is a moment in the seventy-one-page opinion of the Oklahoma Supreme Court — somewhere around the point where Justice James Edmondson catalogs the respondent’s habit of screaming profanities at opposing counsel in courthouse elevators, accusing judges of public drunkenness, and filing lawsuits against his own ex-wife’s family for the stated purpose of making them spend money — when the reader begins to suspect that this is not a typical attorney discipline case. The court itself seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. Ronald Edward Durbin II’s disciplinary proceeding, it wrote, “is almost in a class by itself.”

That is the kind of understatement for which appellate courts are justly famous.

On October 21, 2025, the Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously disbarred Durbin, a Tulsa-based attorney who had practiced law in the state for fifteen years before embarking on a remarkable second career as a self-described “investigative journalist fighting for civil rights” — a transformation that, by the time the Bar Association caught up with him, had left behind it a debris field of harassed judges, threatened lawyers, terrorized community members, and at least one associate who had once shot up his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend’s house. The court found violations in eighteen of twenty counts of professional misconduct and tallied one hundred and fifteen individual rule violations across those eighteen counts. Durbin was ordered to pay $22,152.14 in costs. The disbarment was made retroactive to April 8, 2024, the date of his emergency interim suspension — a date that itself arrived years after the earliest misconduct alleged in the complaints.

The opinion, authored by Justice Edmondson for the unanimous court, is a document that rewards careful reading. It is thorough, methodical, and occasionally astonished by its own subject matter. It is also, in places, unexpectedly fascinating — particularly in its treatment of the one area where Durbin’s conduct, however repugnant, found constitutional shelter. But we will get to the governor and the kiddie porn accusation in due course. First, it is worth understanding who Ronald Edward Durbin II was, what he became, and why the machinery of attorney discipline took so unconscionably long to stop him.

The Making of a “Guerrilla” Publisher

For roughly the first fifteen years of his legal career, Durbin was, by all available accounts, a practicing attorney in Tulsa. Not a distinguished one, perhaps, and not one whose name appeared on landmark cases, but a member in good standing of the Oklahoma Bar Association — licensed, dues-paying, MCLE-compliant. Whatever trajectory he was on during those years, it was not the one that would eventually require seventy-one pages to adjudicate.

The pivot came when Durbin discovered — or perhaps always harbored — an appetite for what has come to be known in certain corners of the internet as “First Amendment auditing.” The phenomenon, for those fortunate enough to have avoided it, involves individuals who enter public buildings (courthouses, police stations, post offices, school administration offices) with cameras rolling, often behaving in deliberately provocative ways, and then recording the reactions of public employees. The stated purpose is to “audit” whether government officials respect the constitutional right to film in public spaces. The actual purpose, in many cases, is to generate content for YouTube channels, where confrontation is currency and outrage is the algorithm’s preferred fuel.

Durbin launched a YouTube channel called “Guerrilla Publishing” and styled himself an investigative journalist. The channel featured what the court’s opinion and community members described as “aggressive, profanity-laced diatribes against public officials.” His targets were not limited to the powerful. He went after school systems in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. He targeted local pastors. He aimed his camera and his considerable capacity for invective at city officials in small towns where the resources to fight back were thin. Parents in the communities he targeted called him “an immature bully” whose “allegations are exaggerated, his demeanor disrespectful and his intent nefarious.” He terrorized people on Facebook. He promoted book burnings. He did all of this, it should be noted, while still holding an active law license — a fact that lent his accusations a veneer of authority they did not deserve and made his targets feel, not unreasonably, that they were being confronted by someone with the power to follow through on his threats.

This is the essential tension at the heart of the Durbin case, and the reason it matters beyond the borders of Oklahoma. The First Amendment auditing movement occupies a genuinely complicated space in American law. The right to film police officers, to record public meetings, to document the operations of government — these are real rights, hard-won and constitutionally grounded. Journalists exercise them every day, and the public is better for it. But what happens when the “auditor” is a licensed attorney? When the person screaming obscenities at a school board secretary is also an officer of the court? When the YouTube provocateur threatening to “kick your ass” in a courthouse elevator is someone empowered by the state to practice law?

The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s answer, delivered across those seventy-one pages, is unequivocal: the same ethical obligations apply. A law license is not a hunting permit.

The Catalog of Misconduct

The Oklahoma Bar Association’s complaint against Durbin — which went through original, amended, and second amended iterations — alleged twenty counts of professional misconduct. The trial panel of the Professional Responsibility Tribunal found every single count established and recommended disbarment. On de novo review, the Supreme Court sustained eighteen of twenty, declining to find violations only on Counts XI and XIII.

The sheer volume defies easy summary, but certain counts illuminate the pattern with particular clarity.

There were the retaliatory lawsuits. Durbin brought legal actions against his ex-wife, members of her family, and his neighbors — not because he had legitimate claims, but, as the court found, “for the sole purpose of causing certain defendants to incur legal expenses.” This is litigation as harassment, the judicial system weaponized as a tool of personal vengeance. It violated Oklahoma’s rules on dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, as well as the prohibition on conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. For any attorney, this kind of abuse of process represents a fundamental betrayal of the privilege of court access. For an attorney who simultaneously presented himself as a champion of civil rights, it was breathtaking hypocrisy.

There was the incident with Judge Sharon Holmes. Durbin yelled at the Tulsa County District Court judge in a courtroom hallway and called her “drunk.” When the Bar Association brought charges, Durbin’s defense was straightforward: he argued his statements were true. He provided, however, no evidence whatsoever to support the claim. The court found violations of the rules prohibiting false statements that impugn the integrity of the judiciary. One can debate the precise contours of an attorney’s right to criticize judicial conduct — and that debate is a worthy one — but shouting unsubstantiated accusations of intoxication at a sitting judge in the hallway of her own courthouse is not criticism. It is intimidation dressed up as candor.

There was the encounter with Taylor Burke. Burke, a Tulsa attorney, had the misfortune of opposing Durbin in an election lawsuit styled Arthrell v. Miller. During the course of that representation, Durbin made what the court characterized as “harassing and slanderous” statements about Burke. The culmination came in a courthouse elevator, where Durbin reportedly told Burke: “You’re so fucking stupid. … I’m going to kick your ass.” Beyond the verbal assault, Durbin also refused to participate when opposing counsel sought to interview witnesses and publicly yelled at Burke in a manner designed to embarrass opposing counsel’s client. The violations here spanned multiple rules — professional courtesy, witness cooperation, conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. But the elevator threat is worth lingering on, because it captures something essential about Durbin’s understanding of legal practice. For him, an adversary was not a fellow professional to be bested on the merits; an adversary was an enemy to be destroyed by any means available, including physical intimidation.

And then there were the community reports — never formally adjudicated in this proceeding but circulating through local accounts — of $150,000 in stolen earnest money. Whether or not those allegations ultimately find their way into a separate legal proceeding, they form part of the broader picture of an attorney who treated every relationship — with clients, with colleagues, with courts, with his own family — as an opportunity for extraction.

The Company He Kept

No portrait of Ronald Edward Durbin II would be complete without mention of his associate, James Conrady. Conrady’s own disciplinary history is, if anything, even more colorful than Durbin’s — he had been suspended from the practice of law thirteen years earlier for, and we quote the record here because paraphrase seems inadequate, “shooting up the home of his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend.” Conrady subsequently practiced law without eligibility in the Tenth Circuit, which resulted in his own disbarment.

That Durbin chose to associate professionally with someone whose legal career had already been interrupted by an episode of armed domestic violence tells us something important about his judgment, his professional standards, and his capacity for the kind of due diligence that the practice of law demands. Birds of a feather, as they say in Oklahoma.

The Resignation Gambit

As the disciplinary walls closed in, Durbin attempted a maneuver that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in the attorney regulation space: the strategic resignation. He submitted his resignation from the Bar — presumably hoping to avoid the stigma of formal disbarment and perhaps to preserve some future avenue for reinstatement. When that gambit appeared not to be working, he attempted to withdraw the resignation. The OBA objected. The court, after examining the submission, found it non-compliant with the applicable disciplinary rules and declined to approve it.

This is a pattern we have seen before, and it never reflects well on the respondent. The attempted resignation-and-withdrawal is the professional regulation equivalent of trying to quit before you’re fired, then asking for your job back when you realize quitting comes with its own consequences. The court saw through it, as courts almost always do.

By the time of his disbarment, Durbin had already been prohibited from practicing law three times over: first by the emergency interim suspension in 2024, then by suspension for non-compliance with Mandatory Continuing Legal Education rules in 2025, and finally by removal from the Roll of Attorneys for failure to pay bar dues in 2025. He was also subject to a separate Rule 7 summary disciplinary action — Case No. S.C.B.D. 7922 — stemming from a nolo contendere plea to charges under 21 O.S. §136, a criminal statute. The disbarment, in other words, was less a bolt from the blue than the final, inevitable station on a long journey of professional self-destruction.

The First Amendment Exception: Andrew Jackson, Grover Cleveland, and the Governor’s Browsing History

And now we arrive at what is, from a legal standpoint, the most intellectually interesting part of the entire proceeding — and the part that should give every legal ethics scholar something to chew on for years.

Among the accusations leveled at Durbin was that he had publicly accused Oklahoma’s governor of “looking at kiddie porn” and a state senator of having an affair in the State Capitol. These statements were made in the context of Durbin’s social media auditing activities, broadcast to his YouTube audience and disseminated across his online platforms. They were, by any conventional measure, outrageous, irresponsible, and entirely unsubstantiated.

The court found no violation.

This was Count XI (or Count XIII — the court cleared both), and the reasoning is worth examining in detail, because it touches on one of the most delicate tensions in attorney regulation: the point at which an attorney’s speech, however reprehensible, is protected by the same First Amendment that protects all citizens.

The court’s analysis reached back centuries, invoking the grand American tradition of political mudslinging. It cited the accusations hurled at Andrew Jackson — that he was a murderer, a bigamist, that his wife was an adulteress. It cited the attacks on Grover Cleveland — the chants of “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” that followed allegations of an illegitimate child. American political discourse, the court observed, has always been ugly. It has always involved accusations of personal depravity, sexual misconduct, and moral unfitness directed at public officials. And the First Amendment, as interpreted by generations of courts, has always protected this speech — not because it is admirable, but because the alternative (allowing the government to punish citizens for criticizing their leaders) is worse.

An attorney, the court reasoned, does not surrender the right to engage in political speech — even crude, unfounded, deeply irresponsible political speech — simply by holding a law license. The accusations against the governor and the senator, while disgusting, were political speech directed at public officials. They fell within the tradition that the First Amendment was specifically designed to protect.

This is a remarkable holding, and a correct one. It is also a deeply uncomfortable one. The same man who was found to have committed 115 rule violations, who threatened to physically assault opposing counsel, who called a judge drunk, who filed lawsuits to bankrupt his ex-wife’s family — that man’s accusations of pedophilia against a sitting governor were constitutionally protected. The discomfort is the point. The First Amendment does not exist to protect speech we like. It exists precisely to protect speech that makes our skin crawl. The court understood this, and in a case where it would have been easy — even satisfying — to pile on one more violation, it drew the line where the Constitution demanded it be drawn.

This editorial board commends the court for that restraint. It is one thing to disbar an attorney for 115 violations. It is another to resist the temptation to make it 116 when doing so would require compromising a foundational constitutional principle. Justice Edmondson and his colleagues deserve recognition for threading that needle with precision.

The Systemic Failure: Why Did This Take So Long?

And now for the question that the court’s opinion, for all its thoroughness, does not adequately address — because it is not a question about Durbin’s conduct, but about the system that was supposed to be watching him.

The misconduct alleged in the Bar Association’s complaints dates back to at least 2017. The complaints were not filed until 2023. The interim suspension did not come until 2024. The final disbarment was not handed down until October 2025. That is, at minimum, an eight-year gap between the earliest misconduct and the final sanction — and a two-year gap between the filing of complaints and the ultimate resolution.

During those years, Durbin continued to practice law. He continued to file retaliatory lawsuits. He continued to threaten attorneys and berate judges. He continued to use his law license as a cudgel against the citizens of small Oklahoma towns who lacked the resources or sophistication to understand that they were dealing with someone who had no business holding that license. Every month of delay was a month in which the public remained exposed to precisely the kind of harm that the attorney discipline system exists to prevent.

This is not a problem unique to Oklahoma. Bar disciplinary systems across the country are chronically underfunded, understaffed, and slow. Complaints take months or years to investigate. Proceedings drag on through multiple amendments, continuances, and procedural detours. Respondents — particularly those with Durbin’s appetite for procedural gamesmanship — can manipulate the timeline to their advantage. The result is a system that, while eventually effective, fails in its primary mission of timely public protection.

In Durbin’s case, the timeline is particularly damning. This was not a close case. This was not a matter of ambiguous ethical boundaries or contested facts. This was a man who was screaming at judges, threatening to assault attorneys, filing lawsuits designed solely to inflict financial harm on his family members, and broadcasting profanity-laced tirades against public officials on YouTube — all while holding an active law license. The trial panel of the Professional Responsibility Tribunal found every single count established. The Supreme Court found eighteen of twenty. The evidence was overwhelming. Why, then, did it take the better part of a decade to do something about it?

The answer, this editorial board suspects, lies in the same institutional inertia that plagues bar associations nationwide. There is a reluctance to act quickly, born of legitimate concerns about due process and the severity of depriving someone of their livelihood. There is an investigative process that, by design, prioritizes thoroughness over speed. There are procedural safeguards that, while individually defensible, collectively create a system that moves at the pace of continental drift. And there is, perhaps, a cultural reluctance within the profession to believe that one of its own has truly gone as far off the rails as the evidence suggests.

None of these explanations is adequate. The purpose of attorney discipline is not to produce a thorough record for posterity. It is to protect the public. And on that measure, the system failed. Every person who was harassed, threatened, defrauded, or intimidated by Durbin between 2017 and 2024 was a person the system was supposed to protect and didn’t.

The Auditor Culture Problem

Durbin’s case arrives at a moment when the intersection of social media, self-styled journalism, and legal practice has never been more fraught. The First Amendment auditing movement has grown substantially in recent years, fueled by YouTube monetization, algorithmic amplification of confrontational content, and a genuine — if often misguided — distrust of government institutions. Some auditors do valuable work, documenting genuine instances of government overreach and police misconduct. Many more are simply trolls with cameras, manufacturing outrage for clicks.

When an attorney enters this space, the stakes change fundamentally. A YouTube personality with no law license who accuses a school board of corruption is exercising a constitutional right. An attorney who does the same thing is leveraging the implied authority of professional licensure — an authority granted by the state, subject to ethical constraints, and predicated on the understanding that its holder will not abuse it. The public does not know the difference between an attorney’s personal opinion and an attorney’s professional judgment. When Durbin, Esq., told the citizens of Sallisaw that their officials were corrupt, his law license was part of the message whether he intended it to be or not.

This is not an argument for muzzling attorney speech. Lawyers have always played a vital role in political discourse, and many of the most important critics of government power in American history have been members of the bar. But the ethical obligations that come with licensure — obligations of honesty, of good faith, of respect for the judicial system, of basic professional decorum — do not evaporate when the attorney picks up a camera. The rules of professional conduct are not a costume to be removed at the end of the business day.

The Durbin case should serve as a warning to every attorney who has considered the auditing path: the license that gives your words extra weight also subjects them to extra scrutiny. You cannot have it both ways.

115 Violations and One Principle

In the end, the numbers tell the story with a clarity that narrative cannot match. Twenty counts alleged. Eighteen sustained. One hundred and fifteen individual rule violations. One attempted resignation, rejected. One associate, also disbarred. One seventy-one-page opinion. One unanimous court. And one man who, over the course of years, transformed a law license from an instrument of public service into a weapon of personal grievance.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court’s opinion in State of Oklahoma ex rel. Oklahoma Bar Association v. Durbin is a model of judicial thoroughness, and Justice Edmondson’s writing balances analytical rigor with an evident awareness of the human wreckage left in Durbin’s wake. The court was right to disbar him. It was right to make the disbarment retroactive. It was right, crucially, to carve out the First Amendment exception for political speech, even speech as vile as accusing a governor of viewing child pornography. The Constitution demands no less.

But the system should not congratulate itself. A process that takes eight years from first misconduct to final sanction is not a process that is working. A regulatory framework that allows an attorney to accumulate 115 violations before losing his license is not a framework that prioritizes public protection. The court’s opinion, for all its merits, reads in places like a post-mortem on a disaster that could have been prevented — and the fact that it could have been prevented, and wasn’t, is an indictment not of the court that finally acted, but of the system that waited so long to bring the case before it.

Ronald Edward Durbin II is no longer a lawyer. He is, presumably, still a YouTuber. The “Guerrilla Publishing” channel may still be out there, somewhere in the vast digital wilderness, its proprietor railing against the institutions that finally held him accountable. But the seventy-one-page opinion that ended his legal career will outlast any video. It will stand as a record — exhaustive, meticulous, and ultimately damning — of what happens when an officer of the court decides that the rules apply to everyone but himself.

And it will stand, too, as a reminder of the question that every bar association in America should be asking itself: How many Ronald Durbins are out there right now — and how long will we wait before we do something about them?

The Ethics Reporter Editorial Board covers attorney discipline, legal ethics, and the regulation of the legal profession nationwide. This article reflects the editorial opinion of the board.