Articles Posted in State Government & Legal Resources

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Please read the information at the Oregon Judicial Department website (click on the What’s New link) and your county Circuit Court website for updated court fee information as quoted below:

“Notice of State Court Filing Fee Changes – Effective October 1, 2009

Notice of State Court Filing Fee Changes
Effective October 1, 2009

Legislative changes in 2009 that become effective October 1, 2009, will significantly change some state court filing fee amounts. (HB 2287, ch. 659, Oregon Laws 2009).

Before filing papers in a state court on or after October 1, 2009, please check the court’s website or contact the court for correct fee amounts.

Fee questions?

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Some (maybe all?) Oregon courts are offering TurboCourt online document preparation for Small Claims litigants. I haven’t seen TurboCourt in action.

Visit the Washington County (Oregon) Circuit Court website and their TurboCourt link. Or, visit your own county’s Circuit or Justice Court to find out if they too have TurboCourt.

In the future, however, Oregon Judicial Department’s eCourt may be where document filing will take place. Here’s a press release on the rollout, which started in Yamhill County in June.

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It takes skill to navigate a website, especially one chock-full of information and one under (re)construction.

You might think that if you go to OJD Judicial Opinions and then select Tax Court Magistrate Division that you’ll get the Tax Court Magistrate Opinions. But you don’t! At least not really, not yet, and not all of them in a nifty database. For that you’ll have to go to a different OJD Tax Court database, where you will find Oregon Tax Court cases back to 1999/2000.

We all have migration to new website issues to contend with, just as we did when we had to contend with print resources that changed format from loose-leaf, to bound, to legal size, to letter size, etc. It keeps us on our toes.

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Hard on the heels of my last post on legislative drafting, we have another story and example:

OLCC revisits restriction on happy hour ads, by Bill Graves, The Oregonian, August 20, 2009

Excerpt: ‘… The happy hour restriction annoys restaurants and bars and frustrates state officials who question whether it’s effective and find it difficult to enforce.

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Naught vs. Naughtiness: The OLR blog is not prudish, but spelling out certain words on the Internet attracts attention from unwanted quarters, e.g. spammers and other undesirables, so forgive my word replacement choices – it is for my own sanity.

This quote, in this article, Ashland city attorney to examine nudity ban (by the Associated Press, August 20, 2009) caught my attention:

“…Oregon does not have any laws restricting nudity or have a crime of indecent exposure. Instead, people can be arrested for public indecency, but that requires sexual arousal.

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For a detailed description of the statutory and administrative framework for the regulation of funeral services, read this recent Oregon Court of Appeals case:

Olson v. State Mortuary And Cemetery Board (A136781)

Judge Landau: “… On review, petitioners advance eight different assignments of error, ranging from a challenge to the authority of the board to enforce federal funeral service regulations at all to arguments about the propriety of the board’s interpretation and application of state and federal funeral service regulations in various particulars. We reject each of petitioners’ assignments of error and affirm....” (read full case)

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Finding the history of a judicial opinion or a statute is relatively straightforward, if only because we do that research so often. This is not the situation when researching the history of a regulation or other administrative rule, especially at the state level.

Also, most of the time we’re looking to update the law (regulation, case, or statute), that is finding out how the particular law reads today, not what it said 10 years ago or how it got to be what it is now, that is, what happened x years ago that made the rule change to what it is now.

So, how do you find the history of an Oregon administrative rule?

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In the late 70’s through 1980’s Oregon county counsel attorneys prepared formal opinions on significant issues, sort of like Oregon Attorney General opinions. These opinions were open to the public, but used infrequently because many were soon out of date and potentially misleading to those who didn’t work with these sorts of documents on a regular basis.

If you need a particular county counsel opinion, ask a staff member in your county counsel’s office. They may have a list or an index of their opinions.

These “formal” opinions are different from other written memos, analysis, etc. that county counsel attorneys write. The latter are generally covered by the attorney-client privilege unless the client waives it. In most cases the client does use it publicly and waives – but that is determined on a case by case basis.

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