Basic Oregon Legal Research Resources

This is a shortlist of some basic, and frequently overlooked, Oregon legal research resources (and one non-Oregon title), for the new Oregon attorney or legal researcher. Most of these are in print version only, not online.

You don’t need to buy these, but you should know about them. Your local law library will either have or have access to the titles that are in print only.

1) Legal Information Buyer’s Guide & Reference Manual, by Ken Svengalis (updated annually, not online)
2) Oregon Legal Research, 2d edition (2007), by Suzanne e. Rowe (not online) (previous edition also useful)
3) Oregon Judicial Department Style Manual (print edition is dated 2002 and online 2002 edition is updated periodically at the OJD website)
4) Attorney General’s Administrative Law Manual and Uniform and Model Rules of Procedure under the APA (not online)
5) Oregon Public Records Manual (not online in full)
6) Other important Oregon AG Office publications
7) Oregon Practice Materials, from the University of Oregon Scholars Bank

Attorneys who specialized in a particular subject area, may also want to keep previous editions of the ORS on hand. (Superseded ORSs are not online, though the Oregon law librarian community is working on that problem.)

I know attorneys who have been practicing for 30+ years and have complete sets of those wonderful individual volumes that Legislative Counsel has been publishing. I hope these attorneys think of their local law library, or fellow attorneys, before disposing of their priceless, and compact, sets!

Other Oregon legal research resources not online include:

· County codes, superseded
· Court approved legal dictionaries
· Disciplinary reports
· Jury instructions, Oregon
· Legal encyclopedias (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· Legal forms, OSB (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· Legal journals (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· Legal monographs (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· Legal treatises (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· Municipal codes, superseded
· OCDLA publications
· Oregon leg history pre-1995
· ORS, superseded (prior to current edition, which is online)
· Oregon state bar publications (some online, but only for paid subscribers)
· PECBR (some online, not all)