If you’re not a lawyer, law librarian, or have never researched the law, where do you begin?
No, it’s not enough to find cases and statutes online. It’s also not enough to toss a question into cyberspace and expect someone to answer it with anything more than research tips.
Think about it.
Librarians, like mathematicians, find humor in the oddest places, so unless you’re one of us, don’t expect to find this as funny as I did:
While catching up on the back-issue research tip wonders to be found in the excellent LLSDC Law Library Lights newsletters, I came upon this article:
(Sometimes people call this 2009-2010 law the Health Care Reform Act, ObamaCare, the Affordable Health Care Act, etc.)
Do you want the enrolled bill, the session law, a section number, or a page number? (If the latter, you’ll need to be specific about which version of the law the page number appears.)
This information may help – or so we can hope:
The Justice’s May 2012 Criminal Waste of Space column in the OC Laywer takes on a crime “wave” (rather a crime “splutter”) in Laguna Beach:
“Dispatches From Lesotho”: The Good Justice Examines Urban—Well, Kind Of Urban—Crime,” by Justice William W. Bedsworth:
“…You can’t follow Shakespeare with How I Met Your Mother. You can’t follow The Firebird Suite with a Pontiac Firebird. When you get to pantsless men standing on rocks and hollering, you just gotta stop….”
If you need a specific article, and have the author or title, you might be able to find it free on the Internet.
(You will need many indexes and a full-service legal research database, and a research strategy, to perform a full legal literature subject search for magazine, journal, law review, newsletter, and newspaper articles.)
1) Use your Internet search engine of choice: enter the article title or keywords from the title and the author(s) name(s).
What would you name a race horse, assuming the name would have to be a law-related, lawyer, or law librarian, or librarian name?
I learned recently that I have a relative who has to name race horses – lots of horses. I used to think it would fun to name a horse, but it’s not that much fun at all if you have to come up with a dozen or more names every time the stable gives birth, so to speak. (There are quite a few collective nouns for horses.)
There are horse naming rules (and more rules) but there are also fun horse-naming tips. Use your favorite search engine and try these searches: rules horse names or naming horses
The Washington County (Oregon) Law Library tries to keep its list of “Oregon Legal Research Resources NOT Online” up to date and we welcome feedback from researchers.
Sometimes we discover that NOT online materials have gone online (yay!) and sometimes we discover yet another resource a legal researcher needs is still not online, so email us or leave a Comment if you notice that we need to update our Not Online list.
You can link to it from our Legal Research Resources page or our Documents Index. Just look for the “Not Online” title.
If that beautifully presented meal you gaze upon was in fact prepared by unwashed hands, harbors e-coli, was cooked 3 days ago and never refrigerated, and has been licked by the cook’s cat, dog, and ferret, would you eat it?
Would you pay good money for original artwork, without guarantees of originality, papers of provenance, and proof of seller’s ownership?
Why then would you risk your life, liberty, property, and family by relying on “law” that might not really be “the law?”
Subscribe to Oregon and U.S. court and case law e-summary services from the Willamette University Law School service: Willamette Law Online. It’s a painless way to stay informed about new caselaw:
1) 9th Circuit Case Summary Service
2) Oregon Court of Appeals Case Summary Service
3) Intellectual Property Case Summary Service
4) Oregon Supreme Court Case Summary Service
5) United States Supreme Court Case Summary Service
For example, they alerted me to this upcoming U.S. Supreme Court copyright case:
It’s only a matter of time before someone asks about “the burrito case, you know, the ‘ultimate fighting’ case.”
This might not be the only Oregon burrito, ultimate fighting case, but if anyone asks, start here:
Oregon Court of Appeals: State vs. Debuiser, A145479 (decided April 4, 2012)
Oregon Legal Research Blog