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We have a new legal research guide on Estate Planning available on the law library’s website. You can find previously posted information on estate planning through the “estate planning” tag at the bottom of this post or through this link. Along those same lines, The Oregonian published an interesting article last Sunday, March 27, on estate sale fraud:

“Complaints to the DOJ concerning estate sellers, secondhand stores and auction houses have doubled since 2008. Among those lodging complaints are an elderly widower, a woman with breast cancer trying to fund her care and adult children selling the family home. All told the state they were never paid for heirlooms, which were either sold at garage sale prices or simply vanished. But when things go wrong, many people don’t know where to turn — and don’t want to shell out as much for legal fees as they’re looking to recoup.”

Consumers with complaints about Oregon businesses, including estate sellers and auction houses, can contact the Financial Fraud/Consumer Protection section of the Oregon Department of Justice’s Civil Enforcement Division. The Attorney General’s Consumer Hotline (1-877-877-9392) is available between the hours of 8:30 am and 4:30 pm. Consumers can also search the DOJ’s consumer complaints database for complaints filed after January 1, 2008.

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If you need to know the legislative history of a Oregon statute, please remember:

1) Prior to 1995, Legislative Minutes and Exhibits were microfilmed. The microfilm isn’t complete, and won’t include many other documents that are required when you need to compile a thorough legislative history, but it is still a very useful research resource.

2) From 1995 – 2007: Legislative tracings and minutes are on the Oregon State Archives website. Legislative bills, session law, and some calendars are on the Legislature’s website.
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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (Wikipedia entry) changed the lives of working people, at least in this country, and at least for a while. (Further tragedies needed to occur for other workplace safety improvements to be made.)

1) Cornell Remembrance of the Factory Fire

2) The Shirtwaist Factory Fire Trial

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I recently had a question about restraining orders, which sent me looking up information about Oregon’s Family Abuse and Prevention Act, known as FAPA. In the process, I realized that our blog’s link to the useful “Revised FAPA Benchguide 2006” had moved far, far away – well, just to the Oregon Judicial Department’s FAPA forms website. Once there, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link to the .pdf.

The State of Oregon FAPA forms on that same page may also be of interest, although it is important to first see if you local circuit court has FAPA forms specific to your county. If they do exist, they are usually found in the Family Law section of the website. For instance, the Washington County Circuit Court’s restraining order forms can be found here.

Other important and related resources concerning restraining orders, abuse prevention, and domestic violence include:

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We frequently have patrons requesting small-estate affidavit forms (it was also a very popular request when I worked in Texas). Here are a few places you can find small-estate affidavit forms and information:

1) Check with the applicable circuit court’s website for the form and/or information on filing a small-estate affidavit. Our circuit court does not offer a small estate form, but they do provide information on filing an Affidavit of Claiming Successor, including the related statutes. Marion county’s circuit court does provide a small estate affidavit form, as do Deschutes and Clackamas (be sure to check your county’s circuit court website as I did not check every county).

2) A common referral for frequently-used forms is the Stevens-Ness Law Publishing Company. They sell Oregon-specific small-estate affidavit forms for both testate and intestate estates (in paper and electronic formats).

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Gustbuster_Top

The Washington County (Oregon) Law Library is scanning the 1953-1987 Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS).

These particular volumes are also known as the “Gutbusters,” because the pages are filed in 7-10” gut-busting (to lift) loose-leaf binders.

Read the project description and view a sample 1955 Chapter:

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The U.S. Statistical Abstract, an official and astonishingly time-saving research tool for researchers, public administrators, land use planners, and the business community world-wide, is slated for the budget chopping block.

It will not be continued online, although there is talk about a pilot project for publishing some of the data, not all of which is available to the public even if researchers wanted to make their own data compilations.

1) What is (or was) the U.S. Statistical Abstract? (You may remember the book, but the data is (or was) also online.) (See the Wikipedia entry also.)

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A free legal search engine: The Indian Kanoon search engine (about).

Furthering the Free Access to Law Movement (about which you can read much more at the Cornell LII blog post Accessible Law):

… the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) brings us a fascinating blog post: Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst:

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A List of Reports to the Oregon State Legislature can be found at the Committee Services Legislative Library blog and you can subscribe to their email notification service, which sends us this message:

“To sign up for Legislative Library News, go to http://www.leg.state.or.us/ and click on http://www.leg.state.or.us/learnmore/ in the center of the page, and then follow the prompts. Legislative Library News is under the “General Legislative” heading.

Agencies: for instructions on submitting required reports to the legislature, see http://www.leg.state.or.us/comm/commsrvs/legReports.html

The Legislative Library is located in the Capitol Building, Room 446, and is open M-F, from 8:00-5:00 during session. Our telephone number is 503.986.1668; email is help.leg@state.or.us”

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The collection of materials in the Oregon State Bar (OSB) BarBooks database is impressive – see the list below. Our lawyers and self-represented litigants still like the print for certain types of research, but the database is an excellent addition to our collection (and to the database collections of many Oregon county law libraries around the state).

For you self-represented (aka pro se) litigants: This online collection does not necessarily mean you will find easy answers to your legal questions and problems; there is generally no such thing. You will still need to update the case law and statutes, determine what procedural steps to follow, and not to put too fine a point on it … figure out what to do with the information you find.

The other useful thing about having these online is that updates can be made easily and quickly. This list is up to date as of a few days ago:

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