Oregon Legal Research Blog

If you haven’t read Tim Rutten’s article, Where is the Outcry, in the Los Angeles Times, June 23rd, 2007, (it is also printed in the Oregonian on 6/25/07, p. D6) add it to your “must read” list, which I’m sure is very long – add it anyway. From the article:

” … In a column posted on the L.A.-based Pajamas Media website late this week, Rose began by reminding readers of legal scholar Ronald Dworkin’s admonition that “the only right you don’t have in a democracy is the right not to be offended,” then went on to decry the pernicious consequences of a “misplaced respect for insulted religious feelings,” now all too common in the West, including the United States. “This respect is being used by tyrants and fanatics around the world to justify suicide attacks and to silence criticism and to crush dissenting points of view,” he wrote….”

Monday’s Oregonian also had a related (at least to me) article, “Google joins Net Censorship Battle.”

I like to look at how other states present legal research and legal information resources online. Here are a couple new websites I’ve run across lately.

Connecticut Law About Criminal Records

California Courts Self-Help Center

The Library Link of the Day today (6/22) links to an inspiring June 19th, 2007, CNN Money story by Paul Sloan about writers who are making a very good living publishing their own e-books:

“Virtual book, real money: E-books don’t have the cachet of a New York Times best-seller, but how many writers will turn their noses up at $300,000 a year?”

Direct link and excerpt from Paul Sloan’s CNN Money story :

A new book out by a fellow law librarian: “What Good is Legislative History? Justice Scalia in the Federal Courts of Appeals,” By Joseph L. Gerken, Reference Librarian University at Buffalo Law Library.

A brief review can be found at the Law Librarian Blog (and you can also search the title on the Internet search engine of choice for more information).

Law librarians spend a good part of their professional lives teaching or performing legislative history research, or trying to locate legislative history documents, so it is near and dear to our hearts. The question of whether or not legislative history should be relied on by the courts to acertain legislative intent has been around for a long time (and not just in the U.S. – it was a big, a huge, deal when some judges in the U.K. courts started using legislative history instead of relying only on the actual text of the statute).

The latest volume of the Oregon Law Review, vol. 85, no. 4, 2006, has one article (out of six total) about Oregon law. It is the Comment “Missing from Oregon’s Takings Clause: The Right to a Jury Trial of Compensation in Eminent Domain Proceedings,” by Sarah Peterson.

You can read the full article online at the Oregon Law Review website. Click on Current Issue and then “download full issue.”

FutureLawyers has a link to a free tutorial on “Researching Companies on the Internet.”

(I presume FutureLawyers mean “Using the Internet to Research Companies” rather linking you to a tutorial that will show you how to research “Internet and Internet-only” companies. A small grammatical clarification, but sometimes small confusions can make for major misunderstandings. Of course, only us fussbudget sorts would even have noticed such a small thing! So visit FutureLawyers and enjoy, with impunity.)

An end to “robo” calls in Oregon: SB 863

Oregonian story, here.

Do Not Call Registy links: federal and Oregon

Steve Wax has been reapppointed to a seventh term as the Oregon Federal Public Defender. Oregonlive story here. Steve also has an entry in Wikipedia, here.

This, my, blog is about Oregon Legal Research, but if you want a quick and dirty way to track Oregon Legal News as it’s reported in Oregon blawgs (aka law blogs), go to Justia’s BlawgSearch and type Oregon into the search box. Try other searches as well and check out the blawg’s other features. Very nice.

Keep in mind there is no simple, one-stop, way to track all Oregon legal news, so keep surfing the local newspapers, the blawgs, the legislative sites, the lawyer blogs, etc.