If you want information about “Swine” Flu and you want information that doesn’t SCREAM at your or PANIC you or otherwise make you a basket case (maybe related to this handbasket), check out your county health department’s websites. For example:
1) Washington County
2) State of Oregon Flu website
3) See also these for more lessons learned (we hope):
Why should Oregon (and some other states) federal District Court cases be available only to people with access to paid subscription databases such as PACER, Lexis, Westlaw, etc.?
With all the loose (i.e. uninformed) talk about “it’s all online” and PACER possibly becoming free and open (with all those unredacted documents – maybe yours?), I expected to find all judicial opinions, or at least federal court opinions (they have bigger budgets than the states) online.
I started looking for something fairly benign, like our very own Oregon federal District Court judicial opinions and found that no, U.S. District Court of Oregon cases are NOT available on a free, public website. Not on Findlaw, LexisOne, PLoL, Justia, or anywhere else. You might be able to find a few selected cases, but not an official database (and authentic) with a complete sequence of up-to-date cases, searchable or otherwise.
The list of Oregon law blogs is growing. Check out Justia’s Oregon Law Blogs list and my own sidebar list of Oregon law blogs. Neither is absolutely complete and non-Oregon bloggers also write about Oregon law.
I recently added to my sidebar list the NW HOA Law Center, which has an excellent blog where lawyers write detailed posts on condo and HOA legal issues.
One easy way to track blog posts on Oregon law is to go to the Justia Blawg Search, type in the word Oregon, and then click on Sort By Date (upper-right hand of screen).
It takes skill to navigate a website, especially one chock-full of information and one under (re)construction.
You might think that if you go to OJD Judicial Opinions and then select Tax Court Magistrate Division that you’ll get the Tax Court Magistrate Opinions. But you don’t! At least not really, not yet, and not all of them in a nifty database. For that you’ll have to go to a different OJD Tax Court database, where you will find Oregon Tax Court cases back to 1999/2000.
We all have migration to new website issues to contend with, just as we did when we had to contend with print resources that changed format from loose-leaf, to bound, to legal size, to letter size, etc. It keeps us on our toes.
Has any librarian not linked to and blogged about this post on 100 Terrific Tips and Tools for Blogging Librarians? Most of these tips will be useful to anyone who wants to be a good blogger.
Writers write about writing and bloggers blog about blogging. We all have much to learn.
Check out the latest Oregon Legal Glossary at Oregon Laws dot org. It’s a fun, easy to navigate, and the sidebar list of links to other Oregon (and 9th Circuit) glossaries is super-handy.
Hard on the heels of my last post on legislative drafting, we have another story and example:
OLCC revisits restriction on happy hour ads, by Bill Graves, The Oregonian, August 20, 2009
Excerpt: ‘… The happy hour restriction annoys restaurants and bars and frustrates state officials who question whether it’s effective and find it difficult to enforce.
Naught vs. Naughtiness: The OLR blog is not prudish, but spelling out certain words on the Internet attracts attention from unwanted quarters, e.g. spammers and other undesirables, so forgive my word replacement choices – it is for my own sanity.
This quote, in this article, Ashland city attorney to examine nudity ban (by the Associated Press, August 20, 2009) caught my attention:
“…Oregon does not have any laws restricting nudity or have a crime of indecent exposure. Instead, people can be arrested for public indecency, but that requires sexual arousal.
Take a look at the Lane County Law Library Index to Legal Research Guides. It’s excellent and will just get better and better. They link to useful legal research guides from Northwest law libraries:
· Adoption
· Oregon Administrative Rules
· Bankruptcy
· Obtaining Birth Certificates
· Border Crossing Guide
· How to Find Oregon Appellate Court Briefs
· Consumer Information/Protection
· Criminal Law and Procedure in Oregon
· Debt Collection–Creditor’s Rights
· Foreclosure, Repossession and Liens
· Oregon Forms
· Landlord/Tenant
· How To Find A Lawyer In Oregon
· Oregon Legal Ethics
· Researching Oregon Legislative History
· Oregon Legislative Records
· Medical Malpractice Issues: Research Sources
· Name Changes in Oregon
· Using the Oregon Revised Statutes
· Finding Public Records in Oregon
· Small Claims Court and Procedures
· Traffic Violations
And, if you’re a Northwest law librarian with a legal research guide not included in this list, let the Lane County Law Librarian know!
For a detailed description of the statutory and administrative framework for the regulation of funeral services, read this recent Oregon Court of Appeals case:
Olson v. State Mortuary And Cemetery Board (A136781)
Judge Landau: “… On review, petitioners advance eight different assignments of error, ranging from a challenge to the authority of the board to enforce federal funeral service regulations at all to arguments about the propriety of the board’s interpretation and application of state and federal funeral service regulations in various particulars. We reject each of petitioners’ assignments of error and affirm....” (read full case)
Oregon Legal Research Blog