Oregon Legal Research BlogI hear we have a lot of legal professionals in Oregon who are interested in copyright law. Here’s a conference for you (though it’s in Maryland).
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Conference: Copyright Utopia
Articles Posted in Other
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Your Credit and Good Name Are Calling You
It’s time for your quarterly credit check. If you have parents or children, make sure you include them in your audit.
You can start with any of these, but do at least one of them. You can’t eliminate the risk, but you can minimize it:
1) Get one of your credit reports (you are entitled to one a year from each of the credit reporting companies, so order one from each company every three months). I use the FTC site as a starting point for accurate information.
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Book: “Uscrewed: the consumer’s guide to getting what you paid for”
In my law library we field consumer law questions, as do most librarians in public libraries, law or otherwise. Open up the phone lines to a call-in show on consumer law and lines will light up – for hours if you let them. Everyone has a consumer law question on a full range of topics from odometer fraud, to credit card company tricks, to retail store policies, to bad service, etc. Take a look at this hot list of consumer complaints at the Oregon AG Office of Consumer Affairs to see just the tip of the iceberg. I could write a weekly column on consumer law Q&A and so could most reference librarians. Heck, we could write a daily column as could anyone in the consumer protection business.
There are lots of ways to deal with consumer issues, and they don’t all involve lawyers, and there is a lot of useful advice out there from Consumer Reports to Nolo Press to Shlep to the National Consumer Law Center to HALT, etc. (the list is endless). Consumer advocates and lawyers do not lack a sense of humor but sometimes it can get a little dark and earnest in the Quest for Consumer Justice. Enter Ron Burley. The current AARP Magazine (Mar/Apr 2007) has an article by Ron Burley (author of “Unscrewed: the consumer’s guide to getting what you paid for” – likely at your local public libraries and bookstores) and it will make you laugh and get the wheels turning. Ron’s system may not work for you, but you may still get some good ideas on the best way to solve your own consumer problems. (And, he lives in Oregon!)
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Presidents, Islands, and Sportswriters
I’ve been at this blogging (aka blorking) more than a year now and have never reviewed, however briefly, any books. But sometimes the urge is just is too strong and you can’t fight Mother Nature, who I swear was a librarian (who else wouldn’t have played dice with the universe?).
When you ask a librarian, or any bibliophile for that matter, what books s/he’s reading, the answer is usually something like this: “Where?” Most bibliophiles have living room books, bathroom books, napping/sleeping books, kitchen books, train books, airplane books, hammock books, waiting-for-someone-to-get-ready or get-picked-up books, lunchtime books, supermarket line books, post office line books, restorative yoga books (so you’ll hold the poses longer without getting bored out of your mind), blood-pressure lowering books, give-me-strength books, and more. Not every book we read deserves a recommendation (yes, Virginia, there are bad books out there), but three books out of my past have recently come back, not to bite but to amuse anew and they are worth mentioning, partly because they have been more enjoyable, or simply less depressing, than most of the contemporary crop of books I’ve also been reading. Those serious books do need to be read, and some are very good, but life is too short not to have a laugh and a dream once in a while and what better place to find that than in a book.
Dedication: Book writers get to make dedications, so why shouldn’t bloggers also have them? I’m going to dedicate these book recommendations to my fellow lawyer and librarian bloggers who have led me to great books and articles, on subjects other than the law of course.
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Shaggy Dog Archive
Shaggy Dog stories: You never know when you might need one of these, the Web’s First Shaggy Dog Archive. Aren’t shaggy dog stories up there with Aesop’s fables and Greek myths? Every well educated lawyer needs to have a well stocked store of them. Nu?
And then there is this: the Law Librarian and the FBI, A Shaggy Dog Tale: PARTS ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE and SIX