Research Journal Part III: Case Law

The Oregon Revised Statutes Annotated

To research case law related to lemon law in Oregon, I began by looking up the relevant statutes I found in the ORS in West's Annotated set (ORSA). The first thing I discovered was that the 646A.400 statutes were mostly found in a different section, 646.315 et seq., because the date of the ORSA print volumes were not current to this year. I went ahead and searched through the annotations of these outdated statutes in case there was anything relevant. Since the annotations include also references to legal encyclopedias, journal articles, and treatises, I took note of those that coincided with materials I had found in my preliminary analysis. On the other hand, I also found potentially useful references to treatises not owned by our law library. So the annotations help both validate completed research as well as suggest other possibilities for other steps in the research process. This shows that the research steps are interrelated and that the process is not always strictly sequential.

As for relevant case law, I found the following possibilities in the "Notes on Decisions" section: Pavel v. Winnebago Industries, Inc., 1994, 127 Or App 16, repeated throughout this statutory section, and Sweeney v. SMC Corp., 2002, 178 Or App 576, also cited three times.

To update this information, I checked the supplementary pamphlet (current through June 2010) where current 646A.400 et seq statutes were available. Reading through the decision notes, one more case that seemed potentially relevant was Liles v. Damon Corp.. 2008, 345 Or 420. All the others dealt with repair situations that did NOT pertain to new vehicles

West's Oregon Digest 2d

Next, I used West's Oregon Digest 2d to see if there were any more relevant cases. I started with the Descriptive Word Index, using the term "Lemon Laws." This cross referenced to "Automobiles, lemon law" and "Consumer Protection, generally." These index terms led to several possible topic keys, such as Consumer Protection 9, 36, and 1 through 50 in general. However, these turned out to be dead ends, and searching in the pocket parts for the Descriptive Word Index revealed why: "Automobiles, Lemon Laws" now pointed to the topic keys Antitrust 206 and Autos 368; and the index term "Consumer Protection, generally" was now "Unfair Trade Practices, generally" which led to the topic keys Antitrust 192 and Antitrust 195. In other words, the topic volumes were more up to date than some of the Descriptive Word Index, showing how valuable the pocket parts are for keeping up with changes in the topic key system.

Looking up these topic keys and then, of course, updating them in the pocket parts, did not lead to any new relevant cases, but did verify one: the Liles v. Damon case. All the others dealt with repair situations that did NOT pertain to new vehicles or award specifics relevant to motor homes only, which is not our case. The topic key Antitrust 206 is the specific one for lemon law, and two of the three cases I chose have this key as a headnote; two cases came under this key that I did NOT select, one having to do with the definition of "passenger" and the other with whether a particular vehicle was a "consumer product" when only occasionally used for personal reasons; neither of these are at issue in this case.

In the interests of currency, verification, and curiosity, I did a search on the Antitrust 206 key number online in Westlaw. Two of my three cases (Liles v. Damon, Sweeney v. SMC Corp.) appeared plus a third one that I had not selected for reasons listed in the previous paragraph. The Pavel v. Winnebago case did not appear, most likely because the case addresses the outdated statutes, some of which were indexed by West under other Antitrust subtopics. I am unclear why they were not subsequently also indexed under Antitrust 206, since the other two given headnotes expressly mention lemon law statutes. I am unclear as to whether this makes it mandatory authority in the current case, but I decided to include the case in my research anyway.

Selected Cases

I then printed these three cases out and read through them. The Liles v. Damon seemed potentially relevant even though dealing with a new motor home, since at issue was whether written notice of defect was required to be sent to the manufacturer before the manufacturer had opportunity to correct defect, and whether lemon law required that written notification contain information beyond request for settlement. Both points could be relevant to our consumer's course of action in remedying her situation. Pavel v. Winnebago also addressed the need to provide the manufacturer with written notice of defect prior to pursuing remedy under lemon law. The third case, Sweeney v. SMC Corp, had to do with the awarding of triple damages and whether pursuing multiple remedies simultaneously precluded the awarding of damages under the lemon law statutory remedy.

Persuasive Authority

To find possible persuasive authority, I used Westlaw to do topic key search under Antitrust 206 in Washington and California. A list of 8 cases was produced for Washington; 31 for California. One from Washington in particular stood out for my research problem, Chrysler Motors Corp., 116 Wn.2d 208, 803 P.2d 314, 1991. This case would be directly relevant on a point that is not specifically addressed in the Oregon statutes or cases: is a demonstrator vehicle still a "new" motor vehicle? This is an instance where that original generation of terms and listing of facts shows itself to be useful throughout research; the term "demonstrator" caught my eye as a result.

The list of 31 California cases did not really seem illuminating beyond what is already provided for in the Oregon statutes, and appeared to follow a set of lemon laws (the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act) quite distinctive from Oregon's. As a result, I did not pursue any of these cases further.

Shepardizing

To verify that my four cases (I included the Washington one) were still good law, I shepardized them online. All of them were current and had been treated positively with no subsequent appellate history. All had been subsequently cited in other cases.

In total, case law research took about five hours to compile, including the time to read and determine relevance, and about an hour to document the process here.