Oregon Legal Research BlogI love the Wisconsin State Law Library Newsletter and always learn something new when I read it. This month, August 2010, in addition to other useful legal research tools (e.g. CiteGenie), they had links to two handy-dandy published reviews / comparisons of Smart Phones. We can’t get enough of those, our mini-brains!
Articles Posted in General Legal Research Resources
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Responses to “Oregon Legal Research Blog” Reader Legal Questions
We are not able to answer reader’s specific legal questions, although we do try to respond when the answer has legal research value to other readers.
Suggestions:
1) Look for updates to specific Oregon Legal Research blog posts, by clicking on the subject Tags at the end of the post. Or, link to the Oregon Law Help website, which has excellent guides for real Oregonians with real legal problems and questions. (Or, check the Oregon Legal Assistance Resource Guide.)
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Zimmerman’s Legal Research Guide
If you haven’t heard or used Zimmerman’s Legal Research guide, give it a whirl. You might find you use it again and again.
Andy Zimmerman has now created a handy-dandy ZRG blog, which is an excellent way to keep atop his updates to the ZRG.
Recent updates include these, but you can find them all, including an RSS feed, from the ZRG blog homepage:
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Error in the Court Report: Legal Publishing
A Law Librarian Blog July 27, 2010, post was interesting on several counts:
1) Yes, the writer is correct. The error should be corrected.
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Indexes: How to Save Time When Researching Legal or Criminal Justice Subjects
Whether you’re researching juvenile sex offender laws or marijuana taxation or jails or something in between, you will want to use an Index, that is, “indexes to periodical literature,” including magazine, journal, newsletter, and other print and online specialty or general publications indexes.
Indexes save you time, lots of time, and enable to you to locate articles you might otherwise miss if you search only full-text resources or simply “Google” a subject.
Most of the following indexes are online, but none is free online, although one or more may be “free” to institutional members, e.g. public library cardholders, educational institution students, staff, and faculty, and professional associations, to name a few groups that offer no-charge online index and other database and literature searching to their members.
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“The Wit, Wisdom, and Worthlessness of Law Reviews”
Gallagher Blogs on June 23, 2010, takes us to this article, which caught my eye because I comment often on how few state law school law reviews publish useful articles anymore on their own state’s laws. There was a time when you could go to them, the law reviews, for excellent case or statute histories. It’s a rare thing now. Many of the law review requests we get now are for articles written 30 years (or more) ago. (Thank heavens for our HeinOnline subscription (and their blog).)
“Law Professor Slams Law Reviews for Impracticality“ …
“The Wit, Wisdom, and Worthlessness of Law Reviews,” by Gerald F. Uelmen, June 2010:
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Editorial Cartoonists in Portland (with a side of Barney and Clyde)
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists 2010 annual conference is going on now in Portland. Among other events, is one at Powell’s tonight at 7:30.
Comics have a funny place in my “law” world. There are some good lawyer cartoons (and wonderful cartoonists who offer them free to libraries), but one does need a break from all those funny lawyers.
Print newspaper comics readers are as possessive and as fierce about the Funny Pages as sports fans are about the Sports Pages. (The Oregonian knows this well and some of their own staffers are as devoted as their readers are to the comics.)
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Oregon Writs of Assistance
There are all kinds of writs: execution, attachment, review, mandamus, and assistance, to name a few.
The one most commonly asked about by pro se litigants is the writ of assistance. Here are some sources of information and forms:
Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association Civil Process Manual (aka “Sheriffs’ Manual”)
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Oregon Statute (ORS) Annotations: The Good, the Really Good, and the Awful
Usually when one wants to “shepardize” an Oregon statute (i.e. look for subsequent cases or legal publications that have cited the statute), the results are fairly uniform whether you check the official ORS Annotations volume (print and online), Lexis-Nexis Shepard’s, or Westlaw Keycite. The results are not usually identical, but there is usually a lot of overlap and maybe a unique hit or two. But for the latest request we got 3 extremely different results for a single ORS statute, which shall not be identified for now in the interest of privacy.
1) The official ORS Annotations had 0 results – yup ZERO.
2) Shepard’s had 4 case citations (and a variety of non-case annotations).
3) Westlaw’s annotated statute (and KeyCite) has a zillion cases. (Well, not quite a zillion, but if you looked at the print ORSA volume, they covered more than 3 pages.)
There is always the “poor-man’s shepard’s,” which simply means you plug your statute citation into a Oregon case law database and run with it.
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Legal Publishing History: Paul J. Ruskin Dies
Robert Ambrogi notes the passing of a legal publishing legend, Paul J. Ruskin:
The Lawyer Who Took Down West’s Copyright in Court Opinions Has Died
Excerpt: “It now seems almost ludicrous. But until fairly recently, legal publishing giant West claimed that it owned the copyright to federal court decisions. I’m not talking about the headnotes West writes or the key numbering it adds, I’m talking about basic information such as the name of the case, the date of the case, the names of the attorneys who argued it, and the page numbers of the opinions.