Oregon Legal Research BlogIt’s summertime. Even lawyers are allowed to dream about food and love. From the ABA Journal Galleries:
6 lawyers with food truck businesses (ABA Gallery, circa 2014)
10 romance novelists with law degrees (ABA Gallery, circa 2014)
Articles Posted in Legal News & Commentary
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Marijuana vs. Voodoo Donuts: A Visual Aid
What does an ounce, 8 ounces, or a pound of marijuana look like – relative to a Voodoo (Doll) Donut?
Portland Police Encouraging Community Members to be Responsible and Considerate with Recreational Marijuana (Photo) (link directly to JPG)
A picture sometimes is worth a thousand words. In this instance, though, courtesy of the Portland Police Bureau, it’s worth a pink box full of laughs.
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What if Readers Turned Pages for the Sake of Turning Pages?: Amazon, Taylor Swift, and Big Brother
Do writers need their own “Taylor Swift” to protect their right to be paid for their labor? (See NPR’s story about Swift, Apple, and right to be paid.)
The latest Amazon plan to pay authors based on pages turned (and presumably read?), makes me wonder if all readers shouldn’t just start turning those pages, whether you read them or not. We can only hope that the Amazon eyes “watching” you turn pages aren’t also able to tell if you have actually read the words. (No, maybe we don’t want to know that.)
“What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?” by Peter Wayner, The Atlantic, June 20, 2015
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Open Source, Lawyers, and Beer: FOSS+Beer, Beryl’s, and a Legal Talk Network Podcast
A podcast from LawSites (Robert Ambrogi): A Most Unusual Episode of Lawyer2Lawyer (Hint: It Involves Beer)
Excerpt: “It is not every day that I get to record a podcast episode in a brewery…. But for our interview with the hosts of the FOSS+Beer podcast, we set up our mikes in Beryl’s Beer Co. in Denver ….
I previously wrote about the FOSS+Beer podcast, which I described as A Podcast About Law, Tech and Open Source. And Beer. Craft Beer. Since I was in Denver and the FOSS folks are in nearby Boulder, we invited them down to talk about open source software, podcasting and, yes, beer….” [Link to full Open Source and Beer podcast]
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Judicial Analytics and Ravel Law (database)
From Dewey B Strategic (“Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession“)
“Ravel Law Launches Judges Analytics: Precedential Behaviour Analysis Made Easy.“
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Last Thoughts on Legislative Drafting and Poetry Month (April at the Law Library of Congress)
“The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World,” April 28, 2015 by Jennifer Davis (Law Library of Congress)
“…. The centrality of interpretation to law and poetry is also explored by Wallace Stevens, most markedly in his poem “Metaphors of a Magnifico“:
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
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It’s National County Government (and Poetry) Month
Hat tip to Gallagher blogs, the ever vigilant and ever playful, law librarians at the University of Washington.
“National County Government Month
April is the cruellest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot. If you’re a fan of Eliot, you might be celebrating April as National Poetry Month.
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Oregon “Jury awards couple nearly $240K over neighbors’ barking dogs,”
“Oregon Jury awards couple nearly $240K over neighbors’ barking dogs,“ by Martha Neil, ABA Journal News, April 16, 2015
“An Oregon jury has awarded nearly $240,000 to a Rogue River couple who said they had to listen to their neighbors’ dogs constant barking for over a decade.
Plaintiffs Dale and Debra Krein said in the Jackson County suit that John Updegraff and Karen Szewc began breeding Tibetan mastiffs in 2002. After that, the giant dogs began barking around 5 a.m. and continued all day, the Kreins contended. They said their neighbors did not attempt to keep the dogs quiet even after the two were cited more than a decade ago by county authorities for creating a nuisance, reports the Medford Mail Tribune….” [Link to ABA article.]
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Oregon Lawyers: Legal Writing Brevity Challenge
At the end of the April 2015 “The Legal Writer” column in the OSB Bulletin, Suzanne Rowe poses a Brevity Challenge:
“How much can you say in just a few words? Here’s the Brevity Challenge: In just six words, write your best demand letter, contract, will, case brief, statement of facts, argument, conclusion or anything else that lawyers write. Send me your prose, along with your name and where you live. The best will appear in a future column of The Legal Writer.”
(The article does not provide an email address for the author. You can send it via her University of Oregon Law School website or to the OSB Bulletin Editor.)
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Public Services Attorney/Law Librarian to Lead Self-Help Center in King County (Washington)
Law Library Hires New Public Services Attorney (from the press release):
“.… The Public Law Library of King County is pleased to announce that Marc Lampson has joined the Public Law Library to serve as the library’s first Public Services Attorney. The newly created position is an innovative response to the ever growing phenomenon of people representing themselves in legal proceedings. Recent statistics from the King County Superior Court show that in 63% of general civil cases at least one party was not represented by a lawyer. In domestic or family law cases, the percentage climbed to 80%. In 91% of the landlord/tenant or eviction cases, only the landlord was represented by a lawyer. In 50% of family law cases, neither side was represented. This trend is typical throughout the United States, and law librarians have found that these unrepresented litigants frequently come to the law library for help.
As a result, a few law libraries in other states have developed self-help centers to provide their patrons with not only research assistance, but legal assistance as well…. [Mark’s] work will eventually entail establishing a self-help center in the library to provide direct legal assistance for patrons and to coordinate further legal assistance through referrals, clinics, workshops, and innovative online methods for the delivery of legal services.