The Oregonian has posted the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability report to the Oregon Supreme Court on Marion County Circuit Court Judge Vance Day.
You can find the report’s link at their 1/25/16 article:
“Judge Vance Day should be ousted from job, in part for refusing to marry gays, commission says,” by Aimee Green, Oregonian, January 25, 2016.
The 2015 ORS are now online
View the online, almost official (i.e. prima facie evidence of the law), 2015 Oregon Revised Statutes at the Oregon Legislature’s website.
Note that any new laws passed in the 2016 and 2017 Oregon legislative sessions WILL NOT appear in codified format until the 2017 Oregon Revised Statutes are published in late 2017 or early 2018.
The short session Oregon Legislative 2016 bills are now online.
As of this moment, however, the 2015 Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are still NOT online, but if you’re very lucky you may click on that link one day, even one moment from now, and find yourself reading the 2015 ORS, which we hope to see shortly. (Call your legislator to ask where they (the ORS) are!)
Many new Oregon laws affecting sick leave, birth control, recreational marijuana, vaping, grandparents, bestiality, early termination fees when you die, and much more are effective January 1, 2016.
How do you find out what these new laws are?
Search online. Here are some keywords to search: new laws oregon 2015 2016 (limiting your results to the past year will get rid of a lot of the old stuff)
The online 2015 ORS will appear shortly, at least we hope before the official start of the 2016 Legislative Session.
The official PRINT ORS is available at law and public libraries around Oregon. (But call first to make sure your library has it in print. Not all libraries get the official print version.)
Note that any legislation passed in the 2016 and 2017 Oregon legislative sessions WILL NOT appear in codified format until the 2017 Oregon Revised Statutes are published in late 2017 or early 2018.
You can read a hundred articles about wolves and their prey, including the ODFW Wolf webpages, but not a single one will explain exactly WHY wolves are, or were, on endangered species lists.
If you look hard enough you really can find hundreds of articles on the WHY, but here is an interesting one that sums up the complexity of the issue:
Scientific American: “Can Wolves Bring Back Wilderness? [Excerpt]: People may find it hard to adapt to an ecology of predation and fear,” by Jason Mark on October 9, 2015:
“State lawyer group mulls controversial changes to make pending disciplinary records off-limits to public,” Portland Tribune, 05 January 2016, by Nick Budnick:
Excerpt: “The state agency that oversees the investigation of ethics complaints against 15,000 Oregon lawyers is considering changes that would hide from public view most pending complaints and destroy all public records of dismissed complaints after three years, a radical increase in secrecy for a system that’s received national praise for its transparency….” [Link to full Portland Tribune article.]
The article links to OSB disciplinary process reports, also currently linked to from the OSB homepage.
When Oregon Laws are codified*, they can be scattered all over their corresponding legislative subject compilation, the Oregon Revised Statutes, so, unless you are a researcher with too much time on your hands, I recommend you start with one of the following resources until you become very familiar with all the new cannabis laws, statutes AND regulations – and there will be new cannabis laws until you die or until the world’s lights go out, whichever comes first:
1) Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS): the 2015 ORS, which has not yet been posted online, will be the first ORS with codified recreational cannabis statutes. Toss the word “cannabis” into the ORS search box. You might want to toss in the word “marijuana” just to make sure you didn’t miss anything.
2) Laws & Regs from OHA: Oregon Medical Marijuana Program (OMMP), which links to their OMMP Administrative Rules, Statutes and Legal Information webpage.
Whether you donate money or in-kind to a charity or nonprofit directly (through their website, in cash, or by check), through “fraudsters” (the FTC word), or through donation clearinghouses like Willamette Week’s Give Guide or the Oregonian’s Season of Sharing ….
Make Sure Your Donation is Doing What You Want it to Do – and learn a little about the nonprofit and fundraising world while you’re at it:
The Oregon Department of Justice Charitable Activities website is a good place to begin your research. Find these topics and more:
The State of Oregon Law Library (SOLL) is providing statewide access to 2 valuable legal research databases, previously unavailable for remote access to non-attorney Oregonians. (No legal research database is cheap, but pooling resources and making Really Good Value legal research databases available to everyone supports “access to justice” goals: to educate students, voters, and anyone else with an abiding lifelong intellectual curiosity about law, lawmaking, judicial process, legal rights, government, and politics.)
Link to EBSCO and Fastcase, from the SOLL Legal Resources webpage:
“1) EBSCO Legal Information Reference Center
Oregon Legal Research Blog