In case you hadn’t heard, the Oregon Administrative Rules (OAR) Bulletin (the monthly updates to the OAR), will be online only, starting January 2010.
The multi-volume Oregon Administrative Rules (OAR) itself will still be available in print.
Law and government documents librarians have been active for many years (especially the AALL Government Affairs office) on this issue of authenticity of government documents.
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?
Law school libraries are excellent sources of legal research guides. You can find many of them with a quick Google search using your topic keyword and then simply adding the words “research guide.” Another useful search word is “pathfinder.”
This Guide to Free and Low-cost Legal Research is from Georgetown Law Library.
As you might imagine, law library associations are another source of excellent guides, and our D.C. law librarian colleagues are a wonderful source, as you might suspect, for federal law research guides. for example, see their recently updated:
In my law library we not infrequently refer people to state (or federal) regulators, whether the question is about professional licensing, premises inspections, or other service within the purview of a government regulator.
But who regulates the regulator? This is not a new question and in fact has probably been around since there was anything to regulate (including the oldest of the oldest of professions).
In the news recently we hear about the stunning, stupefying, failures in the regulation of the food industry (peanuts, for example) and the financial industry (the SEC and Mr. Madoff, for example), and state and local examples of regulatory failures could be trotted out too (buildings, bridges, fire safety, etc.).
The OSB Administrative Law section newsletter, Fall 2007, vol. 8, no. 3, has these articles:
Russell and Hassanpour, “Case Focus: TSPC v. Bergerson,” pp. 2-3.
Mussell, “A HIPAA HINT: Protecting the Protected Health Information of Healthcare Professionals,” pp. 4-5.
Oregon Legal Research Blog