Articles Posted in May, 2006

Farewell to Paper/less Apologies: It’s nice that we no longer have to apologize for wanting to use a fork instead of chopsticks or wanting to read from paper instead of reading online (or vice versa). The responses to Evan Schaeffer’s posting on the Paperless Office show that, yes, it’s OK to Be You. If you like paper, great. If you like online, great. This discussion, we only hope, puts a final period to what seemed to be a Right-Wrong argument. Now if only we can persuade law school and law firm administrators that NOT EVERYTHING IS ONLINE, we can get on to more important arguments, such as whether or not Presidential Signing Statements are a sign of the Apocalypse or whether or not there is perfect indexing software for all those scanned office documents.

Forms from the Feds: Don’t you love the Internet and the Web, not to mention librarians who do this out of a pure sense of public service: Forms from the Feds. (And try typing in theinternet dot com and see what you get 🙂

Blawg-full: Some blog postings are so full of productive links that your brain wants to break into laughter. This May 15th posting, from the parent blog, What About Clients, is one of those postings. I linked to it from info-full, Stark County Law Library blog (its May 18th posting). Enjoy.

LOC Research Tool: The Library of Congress’ Law Library Reading Room web pages are terrific gateways to legal information. Their simple and easy to navigate Guide to Law Online and the Century of Lawmaking, will give you access to great stores of legal history and documents. They also recently added a Global Legal Monitor service.

Literary Allusion and Legal Writing: Wayne Schiess’s Legal Writing blog is worth visiting periodically, not only for the same reason one visits a lot of blogs – to read the comments – but because it is interesting, easy to read, and you’ll almost always find a little something to learn. Current posts on whether or not to use literary allusions have led me further afield to old issues of the Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (available also at HeinOnline and through your local law library), which Schiess cites to in his April 20th posting. And, of course, any visit to HeinOnline gets me totally off-track to some of the other wonderful legal classics they have in their database.

Oregon Court Rules Quiz: How many of you know the answer to this question:

Do any and all of these rules allow for “out of cycle” amendments: UTCR, SLR, ORCP, and ORAP?

I use the word “out of cycle” fairly loosely to refer to any adopted changes made before the annual effective date of new rules. I’ll post an answer next week.

Statutory Research: If you think searching the ORS is tough, try searching the USC. As an example from April 18th, here’s a question sent to the peerless librarians at Boston College Law Library who host a Reference Question of the Week blog:

Q: “A student was trying to find No Child Left Behind Act § 9526, 20 USC §§. 6301 et seq. (2002). He said he had pulled up the document on Westlaw, but couldn’t find § 9526.”

And here is the law librarian’s answer:

OJD and Technology: The current issue (April 2006) of the OSB Family Law Newsletter has an update from OJD’s chair of the OJD Technology Committee on “Technology and Oregon’s Courts.” I’m sure these changes will be welcomed by more than just members of the Family Law Section! You may also want to look at OJD’s Future of the Courts pages. (The Family Law Newsletter is not available at the Section’s website.)

OR DOJ Gas Price Reporter: I’m not so sure this is where the problem is, but if you were looking for the AG’s Gas Price Reporter web page, now you’ve found it.

May 2006 Judicial Elections: The OSB has posted its helpful judicial voters guide. It doesn’t have all the juicy, hash-slinging, eye-rolling campaigning stuff that you might find in the Oregonian or Willamette Week or Portland Tribune, or other local news sources, but it’s still full of good information.