Articles Tagged with Access to justice

Published on: April 6, 2009

Death, Taxes, Bar Exams, and Access to Justice in Oregon

By Laura Orr

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.

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Published on: October 3, 2008

Let’s Kill All the Law Libraries

By Laura Orr

For the past 20 years, at least, law school deans, legislators, law firm managers, lobbyists, jail and prison managers, among others, have been asking why their organizations need law libraries, and heaven forbid, law librarians. After all, “isn’t all the law online?”

My brief response is:

1) No, it’s not all online; only a fraction of it is, and most of that is just online versions of (allegedly official and current) primary sources and a lot of very bad “legal advice”. In other words, the easy-stuff is online, but not the right-stuff (that treatise, that superceded statute, that legislative history, etc.). And, if you don’t know how to use these primary sources in any format, print or otherwise (i.e. do legal research!), woe to those of you who try to make sense of these materials, e.g. the Oregon Laws, online.

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