Oregon legal ASSISTANCE resource guides are different from legal RESEARCH resource guides.
Legal ASSISTANCE resource guides, are guides and directories to government and nonprofit organizations that connect you to lawyers who can provide legal advice from licensed Oregon attorneys.
Legal RESEARCH resource guides, are directions, instructions, and road maps on where and how to research a legal problem or question.
If you need legal research assistance, check your county’s law library website for hours and contact information. If your county law library doesn’t have the professional legal research librarians you need, visit one of the Oregon law libraries listed below.
And don’t forget that your own public library reference librarians and library assistants can reach out to Oregon county law librarians for legal research assistance as well.
OCCLL* (Oregon Council of County Law Libraries) will link you to these and other county law libraries:
Guest post, from Lee Van Duzer, Washington County Law Librarian, Hillsboro, Oregon:
As we socially distance ourselves and physical spaces are increasingly closed, it is important to revisit online legal research options. The following are free general legal research tools to help you work from home.
Case Law & Statutes
If you are not a licensed Oregon attorney and you need to perform thorough legal research (vs “googling a legal problem,” yikes), you have free access to some of the same legal research databases that Oregon attorneys use: Fastcase is one of them and you have remote access to it through your State of Oregon Law Library (SOLL). (Check out their Blog while you’re at the SOLL website.)
You also have free access to NOLO (formerly Nolo Press) databases through the SOLL.
Remember, Google isn’t enough when you have to appear without an attorney before a judge. I recommend consulting an attorney* or a professional law librarian**, but not everyone (or even most) has access to either, let alone both.
The Legal Research is Easy blog post, Hone Those Research Skills, is California-based, but the lessons it teaches apply to law students in every state where public law libraries are supported. Be a good money manager, and get smart: seek out free and cheap legal research resources, human, print, and digital:
“A while back, I read an article in the Los Angeles Daily Journal (Bar proposes revised practical skills requirements) by Lyle Moran that caught my eye. Apparently, the California Bar Association wants to include 10 hours of “practical” legal instruction while law students are still in school. While the article did not say what specific skills the Bar want’s new attorneys to focus, might I offer a suggestion? Might I propose that in that 10 hour mix, law students spend at least three (3) hours at their local county law library to see what exactly their local county law library has to offer.
This is a short list of guides and gateways to Oregon self-help litigant and legal information resources. You can drill down into any of these websites and find many more legal resources:
We love reading the Fastcase 50 list to find out who is doing what, why, where, and how – and especially so when there is an Oregonian on the list.
Read the 2016 Fastcase 50 list and previous lists, back to 2011, when the List was born.
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
News from the Oregon State Law Librarian:
“In addition to the EBSCO Legal Information Reference Center, all Oregon residents have access to Fastcase. Please click on https://apps.fastcase.com/Research/Public/Oregon/login.aspx and register as a new user. Content includes the United States Code, revised statutes, regulations, attorney general opinions, and caselaw for Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Also included are archived statutes and session laws from HeinOnline.”
Link to the State of Oregon Law Library’s Resource page for many more research resources.
“The library is a growing organism.” [Ranganathan, the fifth of “Five Laws of Library Science”]
Visit the new website of the Multnomah Law Library for your legal research adventures. Note that Saturday hours have returned, remote and in-library database access is expanding, and the online catalog will earn its keep as a time-saver.
And don’t forget the Oregon legal research databases I featured in last week’s blog posts, from the State Law Library and OSB.
Oregon Legal Research Blog