The Oregon Revised Statutes, or ORS, is almost always one of the staple resources used by our patrons in their research; after all, they are the enacted laws of the Oregon State Legislature. They are particularly often a starting point for questions of law that don't already have large bodies of secondary and practice materials built up around them, but instead may be more obscure or random. And of course, secondary and practice Oregon materials necessarily point back to and serve as guides and commentaries to the statutes. There are 62 titles in the ORS, codified by subject matter. Researching a given topic in the ORS follows the usual pattern: generating search terms; using the index to locate terms, subentries, and potential cross-references; locating the resulting statute title, chapter, and number; carefully reading the statute(s); reading the annotations and following relevant case or other citations. I have sometimes found, too, that if the index does not seem to have the terms one is looking for, sometimes it is useful to pick a title and then chapter that deals with the general area of law in which your question falls, and then scan the table of contents at the beginning of that chapter.
In additon to various commonly used titles and chapters with which I have become familiar, Rowe mentions another one I hope to keep in mind; chapter 17 houses BOTH the Oregon and U.S. Constitution. I can think of at least two patrons I have had wanting to compare state and federal constitutions, and while I found them both, it never occurred to me that both were published together in the ORS. Rowe also discusses a feature I hope to start consulting more frequently; the ORS volume with Quick Search, where legislative acts are listed by name and terms are defined. She also helps clarify a little bit of a mystery; if West's Oregon Revised Statutes Annotations is so much more extensive than the ORS' own Annotations volume, why bother with the ORS version? She notes that the latter's listed annotations may be more focused and onpoint, and therefore more relevant and/or helpful in a research situation where there is plenty of legal material.
As for research the ORS online, which I am not a huge fan of since returns from the contextless "search box" are generally overbroad and overwhelming, it is interesting to find that it is not actually considered an official source. I find that if I am going to use the online ORS, browsing the tables of chapter contents is far more productive than using the search box.
Understanding how to read statutes at three levels of analysis outlined by a 1993 court case known as PGE should also prove useful in helping patrons research questions. First, of course, is the plain reading of the text itself. Included in this first level of analysis is reading the context of the statute: nearby sections, subsections, related statutes, and previous statutory interpretations by court cases. The second level of analysis involves legislative history: tracking the history of a particular statute and by doing so learning about the intent of the legislators (covered in the next post). The third level involves following established or general "maxims of statutory construction;" the resource I want to remember here is Statutes and Statutory Construction.
A few other gleanings from Rowe about statutes aside from the ORS: other states' codes are available online for free at Findlaw(http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/) and Cornell University's website (http://www.law.cornell.edu/), as well as on Westlaw and LexisNexis. Paraphrase rather than quote longer statutory sections when writing analyses about statutes. Federal statutes are codified in both the United States Code Annotated (this is the one our library subscribes to) and the United States Code Service, organized into 50 titles. These do not correspond to state code titles! The USCA may provide more annotations than the USCS, but the USCS may provide more useful tables.
It is important to remember that court rules at all levels of jurisdicition are found in statute codifications; in Oregon this includes the Oregon Rules of Civil Procedure, the Evidence Code, the Oregon Rules of Appellate Procedure, the Uniform Trial Court Rules, and so on. Rules should be read like statutes, and have annotations to cases about them just like statutes. Commentary from the drafting committee about the rules are considered persuasive authority. West provides deskbooks on Oregon Rules but often the online rules are more current; I helped a patron just last week whose search for a rule form illustrated just this point. Rule changes are printed in the Oregon Reporter's Advance Sheets, but not in the bound volumes. Federal rule resources with annotations include the USCA, USCS, the Federal Practice Digest, the Federal Rules Service, and the Federal Rules of Evidence Service.
Next up: Legislative History!
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