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My fellow law librarians reminded me about the new United States Code (USC) Title 51 (which you will actually cite more like this: 51 USC xxx).

That USC Title 51 will (does!) sound strange to us old-timers. (Though not for the same reason it will confuse Area 51 devotees – and Title 51 is about Space Programs – ha ha ha.)

There isn’t yet a codification to find at the Cornell LI site or at the official FDSys United States Code site, but you can still look at the Session Law, P.L. 111-314 (enacted on December 18, 2010): Title 51, United States Code, National and Commercial Space Programs

U.S. Office of Law Revision Counsel brings us USC Title 51 (and main Positive Law website)

Related to this, is a reminder not to confuse U.S. session law (U.S. Statutes at Large) with its codified version (United States Code) or it’s commercial versions, U.S.C.S. (LexisNexis Matthew Bender) and U.S.C.A. (Thomson Reuters).

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If you were raising eyebrows over the “Candidate Residency” court battles in Illinois this past week, you’re not alone.

If you want to read the opinion, and share one with a law librarian, you can read the Law Librarian blog post: Rahm Opinion a Bit Uncivil.

Everyone else has an opinion, too. Use your favorite search engine to find them: illinois supreme court rahm emmanual

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This was hilarious (thus, good for a Friday late afternoon), but also instructive – or it should be instructive to any of us who think we know anything about websites. (Most of us admit to being amateurs – but even the pros make mistakes.)

“Law school Web sites judged; some found wanting,” by Karen Sloan, The National Law Journal, January 26, 2011:

‘There are a lot of law students happily lounging under trees out there — if law school Web sites are to be believed.

A recent empirical study and ranking of the home pages for all 200 American Bar Association-accredited law schools found that 65 included photos of students in or around trees, a phenomenon the authors dubbed “Girls Under Trees.”….’ (Link to full article.)

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Oregon lawyer, John Gear, has started a Law for Real People blog.

You can find links to other Oregon lawyer blogs in this blog’s sidebar: under Blogs: Oregon Legal Topics and also under Blogs: OR Lawyers.

I include links to Oregon lawyer blogs and websites that have useful “content,” i.e. they provide legal information, on a variety legal topics, that might be of value to other lawyers, pro se litigants, and any other Oregonian who has legal questions.

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Referral and Information Services Assistant (part-time):

Responds to requests for legal information and assistance from attorneys and members of the public.

Required:
1) Graduation from high school or an equivalent GED certificate.
2) At least one year of college, business, or secretarial school desirable
3) more

Responsibilities include the following.
1) Provides professional customer service while conducting confidential and sensitive telephone interviews with members of the public needing the assistance of an attorney or a community resource in Oregon.
2) Uses custom entry-and-retrieval database program to perform attorney referrals according to geographic location and area of law needed.
3) more

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Ha ha ha. I spent time this morning doing the following (fellow public and private law librarians around the state do the same, just about every day):

1) Showing a lawyer and others how to compile a legislative history – this can take an hour or more, depending on how far back and how complex the question is. Ask your Legislator to show you how to do this. Ha ha ha. (They are probably glad we don’t send all our patrons and their questions to their offices!) You cannot do this online for any legislative history before 1995 or if you want any of the Exhibits from 1995 forward. Ha ha ha.

2) Explaining to lawyers that the ORS is not online, EXCEPT for the current year. Superseded ORSs DO exist digitally back to (maybe?) 1997 or thereabouts. But the Oregon Legislature DOES NOT keep previous ORS editions online, even though they could – easily. Ha ha ha. Maybe they don’t know that lawyers and pro se litigants really need to see those old ORSs! Ha ha ha. (You can find some of them here, thanks to our favorite law student, Robb Shecter, and his Oregonlaws dot org website.)

So, the next time someone says, “It’s all online,” do this: ha ha ha (or type the word laughing into Google Images and have a giggle :-).

Here’s my latest list of what legal information is NOT online and/or NOT FREE online (from this Legal Information website).

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While searching for recent 2011 Oregon bills, I found a glitch in their search engine. The bill I knew existed wasn’t showing up, no matter what word or number I used to search for it. I double-checked (against the actual bill) and triple-checked by asking colleagues to see if the problem was me rather than the database. It wasn’t me.

The lesson here is: Be careful about relying solely on the Oregon Legislative bill searching utility, Ultraseek. (You can also reach this search engine from the Legislature’s website. Then, click on Bills/Law, and then click on the year you want to search – and then “Search the bills and laws.”)

Keep in mind also that Ultraseek is not an exception to any search engine reliability rule – and it’s actually not too bad as these sorts of free search engines go. The problem exists for all search engines (and databases); they are all flawed (e.g. Google isn’t perfect either –aren’t you shocked, shocked?!)

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If you saw the Oregonian story (or in other news sources):

“John Doe’ faces deportation after serving sentence for stealing slain Ohio boy’s name,“ January 28, 2011, by Bryan Denson, you might have read this part of the article:

“…. His fraud was uncovered last year when agents of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service ran a data search of passport applications against the names and identifications of deceased citizens. The ongoing probe, known as Operation Death Match, spit out the name Jason Robert Evers, which ultimately lead them to Krastev….” (Link to full article.)

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The Willamette Week has an article about the Oregon Single Payer Health Care Conference, to be held Saturday, January 29, 2010:

Coverage for All: Is Single-Payer Health Care the Cure for Oregon?, by Stacy Brownhill:

“State Rep. Michael Dembrow wants to establish in Oregon what the White House and Congress couldn’t do in last year’s healthcare reform effort: single-payer health care.

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