Visit the Oregon Nonprofit Leaders Conference website for more information. And look at their sponsors and their resource lists too.
Meet with grant makers and grant writers, learn about managing staff and finances, and meet with others who have the same questions you do.
Nonprofits in Oregon have excellent resources for learning how to run effective and fiscally sound nonprofit organizations. Visit the TACS website.
This is an interesting story:
Law Professors Seek Injunction over ‘Sham’ Treatise Supplement, by Shannon P. Duffy, The Legal Intelligencer, April 16, 2009.
Excerpt: “An ugly dispute has erupted between West Publishing and two law professors who claim they were falsely identified as the authors of an annual supplement to a treatise on Pennsylvania criminal law even though they had nothing to do with writing it.
PI Buzz has a post, with Comments, about a Mexican court records database: Mexico Court Record Index Online.
Finding other countries’ court records databases doesn’t appear to be that difficult in a Google World, however, you should always try and talk to people who use those databases professionally to find out the pitfalls, the shortcomings, the strengths, and the alternatives. Private investigators and librarians who specialized in public and criminal records searching are excellent resources for database evaluations.
(PI Buzz also has a series of articles about Sunshine Week and government transparency.)
An Oregon county law library colleague found the “pig” case we were looking for (previous pig post), except it turns out to be cows, not pigs – yoinks!
(In everyone’s defense, the students thought they were looking for a case about foreseeability or proximate cause, not res ipsa loquitur – and a pig and a gate and The Law – or so their instructors told them.)
From my colleague: “Perhaps we are seeking the wrong barnyard animal? There is a similar Tillamook County case involving a cow and an open gate: Watzig v Tobin, 292 Or 645 (1982) 50 Or App 539 (1981).”
During a recent search for an old Oregon case* (at least we think it is an Oregon case – and even that it is old may be debatable), a colleague sent me a link to this news story about some feral pig legislation working its way through the Oregon Legislature: HB 2221 (PDF or HTML):
Man vs. pig like Ahab vs. Moby Dick, by MARK FREEMAN, Medford Mail Tribune, April 11, 2009:
Excerpt: “POWERS, Ore. — There’s a big pig rooting its way around Jody Cyr’s 400 acres of southern Coos County rangeland, and Cyr has spent the better part of the past three years doing his best to kill him.
People seeking to divorce often don’t realize how entwined their lives have become, with each other and with the law. It’s hard enough to deal with finances (and the dreaded QDRO) and “telling the children,” but what do you do when the benefited children get their own divorces, and the will doesn’t specify what share, if any, the ex-spouse gets?
A recent article in the April 2009 issue of the OSB Estate Planning and Administration Section newsletter (previous issues of the newsletter are free online) addresses some of these issues and looks at some recent Oregon cases:
“How to Avoid Unintended Consequences of Estate Planning in Dissolution Court,” by Lisa Bertalan and Melissa Lande.
A recent bill in the Oregon Legislature, 2009 HB 3274 (HTML or PDF), and a question from a patron, started me thinking about what my research strategy might look like if I had to draft legislation on this subject or if I had to argue for or against taxing marijuana sales (medical marijuana or other uses, if any).
(There was also this recent New York Times story: Struggling States Look to Unorthodox Taxes, by Jesse McKinley, February 28, 2009.)
And, I attended an interesting program recently on evidence-based research (origins in evidence-based medicine), which gave me even more ideas on sources one would need to consult to write the definitive guide to marijuana research, or even just marijuana taxation.
Who are “the people” the U.S. Constitution keeps referring to? (Notice how no one has taken up the Wiki Answer challenge to this question.)
This is not an uncommon question in public libraries, law libraries, and in government documents libraries (even after the 2008 election).
It’s also one of those questions to which we all know the answer (or think we do), but that is rather difficult to answer to anyone’s satisfaction because there isn’t a single legal pronouncement that will satisfy everyone.
When you read documents with phrases like this, “ISPI misappropriated the dongles,” is it any wonder that people want to return to darker ages (before computers and maybe even before electricity!) or want desperately to flee into the forest, or hide inside a beer, for a long while until the madness settles down?
I’ve been reading, in a rather desultory fashion I admit, news about the (not yet final and not the only digital book project on the planet (see Open Content Alliance story in NYT)) Google Settlement and drifted from the excellent Library Law blog to Rebecca Tushnet’s posts on the subject (which is where the dongle discussion came from).
What’s a person to do to keep up with it all? Not much. My recommendation is to keep up with the things you find interesting, the things you have to keep up with for your work and your families, and turn to the experts when you need a primer on something you’ve never heard before or just confuse you.
The Feb/March 2009 issue of the Oregon State Bar (OSB) Bulletin has an interesting editorial by Oregon attorney John Gear: A Better Beginning:
There is no shortage of commentary on the life, death, and value of bar exams (including bar exam humor from Blawg Review), but that is as it should be.
Excerpt: “As a transplant attorney, still fairly new to Oregon, it is with some trepidation and thoughts of tilting at windmills that I write to propose fundamental changes to the state’s bar admission practices. However, after reading the December bar Bulletin, I find I must.
