I was visiting the ever-enlightening FGI blog (Free Government Information) and came across a blog post about this treasure: State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States
You can link directly to the State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States and if you do, make sure to click on the Oregon link, which was set up by the very talented Oregon librarian, Liz Paulus.
“New Oregon Legislature administrator selected,” Statesman Journal, 8/2/12:
“A new administrator for the Oregon Legislature will be on board at the Capitol in mid-September.
He is Kevin Hayden, who will retire soon as a lieutenant commander and a branch head in the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel….
…
Hayden’s appointment is subject to approval by the Legislative Administration Committee, which will meet when lawmakers come to Salem Sept. 10-12. The committee is led by Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, and House co-Speakers Bruce Hanna, R-Roseburg, and Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay. The leaders of each party caucus in both chambers also are on the committee….” [Link to Stateman-Journal article.]
Sincere apologies, but there is no way to make this a short blog post for those new to this task, so bear with me.
This blog post will cover these topics:
I) Online Court Documents: A Brief Primer
Legislators don’t draft statutes, which should be a surprise to no one. (Have you ever tried to read your state or federal statutes?! Just as bad, try reading the Oregon Constitution in order to find an answer to a simple question.)
Drafting statutes is an art and a craft and we should be thankful that our state and federal legislators don’t do the actual drafting, although, it would be nice if they made sure the final statutes themselves made sense, not just listened to and voted on what was “intended.” But we are all human, or most of us are in any event, and there is a limit to how much we can fit into 24 hours.
Anyway, legislative staff members, lobbyists, and sometimes ordinary citizens draft or participate in the drafting of statutes, and it sometimes starts with op ed pieces proposing new legislation, like this:
The State of Oregon Law Library gives us this tip about how to find FDAB Orders (Fair Dismissal Appeals Board):
FDAB Orders are not (yet) available online. DOJ provides hard copies to the Supreme Court Law Library and the three law school libraries. But they are working on a web site and will be posting the orders online at that web site. Link to the FDAB web site where some of the orders will be found in the fullness of time.
We heard a good-news update on the Oregon Ballot Measure Archive Project, which founder and leader Joshua Binus says is alive and well.
From Joshua:
“The biggest news to report of late has more to do with the movement of the collection into a permanent repository. Portland State University’s Special Collections has formally adopted BMAP and has been working to organize it for public access over the past year. We will do some media outreach once it’s ready.
From Free Government Information (FGI) (and check out their blogroll):
“Sunlight releases Scout to help track legislative/regulatory process”
“Today, our pals at the Sunlight Foundation released Scout, a new tool that allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions — at both the state and federal level! They’ll also soon release their Open States tool to target the legislative process of all 50 states….” [Link to FGI and Scout at Sunlight.]
On June 15, 2012, the Washington State Supreme Court adopted a new rule:
APR 28, entitled “Limited Practice Rule for Limited License Technicians”
You can link to the text of the new rule and the final order from:
“The CIR is an innovative way of publicly evaluating ballot measures so voters have clear, useful, and trustworthy information at election time.”
The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission (aka CIR) website can be found at the Healthy Democracy Oregon website where you can read about CIR’s origins. (But they clearly need a year-round blogger 🙂
If you want to track initiatives that will appear on the November 2012 ballot, use the Oregon Secretary of State Election Division’s Initiative, Referendum, and Referral Search engine. You can search measures from 1998 to the present, but you’ll need to get a little more creative if you want to find the text of pre-1998 measures.
It’s not always easy to find original and official texts of Oregon Measures (citizen or legislative referrals), so here are some tips*
MEASURE 5: Property Taxes
Measure 5 was a 1997 House Joint Resolution, and an amendment to the Oregon Constitution (Article XI, Section 11).
Oregon Legal Research Blog