Articles Posted in General Legal Research Resources

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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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One of our local attorneys and I have been having a conversation about effective dates of ballot measures. Effective dates for ballot measures are different from the constitutional and statutory ones for statutes that are enacted by the Oregon Legislative Assembly.

The Oregon Constitution, Article IV, Section 1 (4)(d) says:

“… Notwithstanding section 1, Article XVII of this Constitution, an initiative or referendum measure becomes effective 30 days after the day on which it is enacted or approved by a majority of the votes cast thereon. A referendum ordered by petition on a part of an Act does not delay the remainder of the Act from becoming effective….”

One could wonder what “the day on which it is enacted or approved by a majority of the votes cast thereon” means. Is it the date of the election or the date of the certification or the date of a ballot recount, if there is one? Not to over-think it, which lawyers (and law librarians) do all the time, common sense says that it is the date of the election, assuming the measure passed.

To confirm this, I wandered here and there online (it’s too soon for the Measure in question to be anywhere in print given that it passed just last November), from the Legislature’s website to the Secretary of State, Elections Division, website, and beyond, to no avail.

My next starting point became the blog post I wrote back in 2007: Effective Dates of (Oregon) Legislation

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The Kip Kinkel case (Kinkel v. Lawhead (A137866),decided by the Oregon Court of Appeals on January 12, 2011, can be found at the OJD website:

Link to full case or to the very helpful Media Releases, where you can find summaries for most Oregon appellate court decisions.

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A former Umatilla County Law Librarian said during a discussion about the importance of public law libraries:

“The folks who cannot pay for a private attorney and cannot get a legal aid attorney are already disadvantaged in being forced to be self represented. With the law library, they have a slim chance at self representation, but it is at least a chance. Without a public law library, they have no hope of achieving any sort of justice at all…. What is the point of operating court facilities if the system doesn’t work for everyone? ”

From a report on access to justice in Oregon:

“There is significant unmet need for outreach, community education and access to easily used, high quality self-help materials…. Lower income people obtain legal assistance for their problems less than 20% of the time.” (From, The State of Access to Justice in Oregon, by D. Michael Dale, published in 2000, sponsored by the Oregon State Bar, the Oregon Judicial Department, and former Governor John Kitzhaber.)

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A colleague passed this along, from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Law Blog (and you can read other WSJ blogs, too):

“Survey Says! Paralegaling is a Better Job than Lawyering,” WSJ Law Blog, 1/6/11

The WSJ Law Blog seems to have a slightly higher caliber of Comments than some other news websites and blogs. See, e.g. their Oregon Supreme Court decision blog post (re Barger (SC S058345) and Ritchie (SC S057701 (Control), S057705):

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While playing around with our newly installed OSB BarBooks database and came across this mysterious Boolean search: variable: 4 and weights:7

While waiting for the answer to reveal itself, I went off to catch up with my law library blogs and ran across this excellent research tip post at the KCCLL (King County Law Library) Klues blog:

“Cheat sheet” comparing Lexis and Westlaw search syntax Research Tips

It links to:

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Despite cries from legislators and others that It’s All Online, in Oregon at least (and we really do know it’s the same in other places), IT IS NOT ALL ONLINE!

For example:

Have you ever tried to find an Oregon city or county code without these dance steps?

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For my regular readers who might want a break from the holiday madness and might (ho ho ho) be wondering about that $5.2m verdict win in the lawsuit filed by 2 law professors against “West publishing” (now a family member of theThomson Reuters corporation) here are a some links:

1) Jonathan Turley blog post

The funniest Comment: “Regardless of such appeals, these two professors should be given credit for finally finding a way to become millionaires from a state law treatise. That alone will make them living Gods among legal academics.”

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