Return to the Law Library

Thursday, August 28, 2014

History of the Oregon State Fair

The Oregon State Fair is currently taking place at the Oregon State Fair and Exposition Grounds here in Salem. The state fair has been an ongoing tradition in Oregon since 1861. After the first fair in Oregon City it has been held in Salem for more than one hundred and fifty years.
In 1885 the Oregon State Legislature officially charged the state board of agriculture with the management of the Oregon State Agricultural Society and the State Fair.



Discussing the first fair in 1861 the Oregon Argus on September 7th stated:
We are a go-ahead people, and if we design to keep up with the people of other States, we must not forget that all improvements worth anything – of whatever character – are effected only by zeal, labor, and perseverance. Come up, brethren and sisters, to the work expected of us.


Next year, in 1862, The State Republican’s had a gloomier take on the state fair.
Of home manufactured articles on display was rather slim, but all that could be expected of a people who have depended on foreign manufactories so long that they can’t make a broom stick or an ax handle until poverty drives them to it.


The articles above are both drawn from the excellent Historic Oregon Newspapers website. I think we can agree that Oregonians today are filled with zeal and labor and are not only driven to axe handle manufacture by poverty.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

PACER Update

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is a distributed system that provides online access to federal court documents. On August 10th PACER announced it would be removing access to large swaths of cases from the system:

As of August 10, 2014 the following information will no longer be available on PACER:
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit: Cases filed prior to CM/ECF conversion
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit: Cases filed prior to January 1, 2010
  • U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Cases filed prior to March 1, 2012
  • U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California: Cases filed prior to May 1, 2001

From now on in order to access the covered cases one will have to contact the court directly.

Why PACER removed access to case archives of five courts

The Washington Post reports that the court’s migration to a new case management system is the cause of the change.

It may be possible to access some of the removed documents through the RECAP database of PACER documents.
The RECAP project is a partnership of the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and the non-profit Free Law Project. It consists of a browser extension that informs you when there is a free copy of PACER documents you are browsing. If there is not a copy in the RECAP database it prompts you to share the document with the database after you purchase it.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Oil Train Derailments

Sitting in the State of Oregon Law Library one can hear the occasional train pass on its way to or from Portland. Many of these trains contain the black squat cars used to transport crude oil through Oregon.

Recent accidents involving oil carrying rail cars have energized state and federal regulators.
  • North Dakota oil train fire – December 31st, 2013 fire that forced the evacuation of 1,500 residents of Casselton, North Dakota.
  • Lac-Mégantic derailment – July 6, 2013 derailment and explosion of a freight train carrying crude oil in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The resulting fire and explosion killed 47 and destroyed roughly half of the downtown area.
  • BNSF derailment in Seattle – July 24th derailment of a train carrying crude from North Dakota. There was neither a spill nor any injuries.
Oregon governor Kitzhaber has responded with a call for more rail inspectors, improved reporting and transparency.
The federal government has primary rule making power in the United State with regard to railroad commerce and safety. The feds have initiated rulemaking changes that intend to make the transportation of oil by rail car safer.


Friday, August 15, 2014

Wildfires in Oregon

In recent weeks wildfires have plagued portions of the Pacific Northwest. On July 16th Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has declared a state emergency and mobilized the Oregon National Guard. This week light rain and lowering temperatures have helped to calm the ongoing fires. Despite the recent good news about the wildfires a lot of Oregonians are threatened or affected by the ongoing crisis.
Both the Federal and State forest services put a lot of great information online. Keeping up to date on wildfires can help keep you safe. No one wants to find themselves in the danger zone of an active fire. The Following websites are great places to get up to date fire information:
  • Northwest Large Fire Map
    • Northwest Interagency Coordination Center publishes a regularly updated map of fire incidents around the Northwest. The map plots the areas of the fires and tags the fires with detailed information about their status. The map provides geographic plotting of fire extent and links to the Inciweb entries for each fire.
  • Inciweb
    • The National Wildfire Coordinating group maintains this official online database of active and inactive fires across the United States. This database is updated minute by minute with detailed data on wildfires in the United States. You can display incidents by state, age, status and type. The individual reports on incidents include a summary of the situation, contact information, a map, images and links to news releases.
The Oregon department of Forestry and the United States department of Forestry also maintain their own websites devoted to wildfires in the state.

Oregon and Federal planning for forest fires started well before the fires broke out and will continue well after they are out. Key to the efforts are the laws and regulations of the state of Oregon.
Oregonians have for decades been working on and thinking of ways to manage the great forests of our state. Here is preamble and summary of the 1925 act creating the state board of forestry.



Thursday, August 7, 2014

Dictionaries: Revolution and Philological Society of London

We all know there are few activities as satisfyingly conclusive as looking a word up in a dictionary. A dictionary definition is synonymous with unbiased and certain fact. Dictionaries are institutions of staid and magisterial certainty.

Nothing could be farther from the truth! Two of the most respected dictionaries in the English language are rooted in a 19th century ideological struggle that grew in part from an 18th century.

Noah Webster wrote in 1828 in the introduction to his American Dictionary of the English Language:
"It is not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country, should have a American Dictionary of the English Language; for although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences exist. Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve the identity of ideas that cannot retain an identity of language."

Webster himself was an ardent American nationalist and revolutionary. He was a constitutional pamphleteer and an editor of the Federalist Party newspaper. He viewed his dictionary as an active agent of American exceptionalism. Indeed in the introduction to his dictionary he wrote:
"I present it to my fellow citizens, not with frigid indifference, but with my ardent wishes for their improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of the character, and the glory of my country."

Webster’s dictionary was not a cold and impartial arbiter of language but as a lively argument for “the glory of my country”. The dictionary had a parochial guiding vision. It denigrated references to King’s commissions and outmoded terms of nobility such as heraldry while lifting up American institutions such as land-office and selectmen.

Thirty years later the Philological Society of London would enunciate an entirely different purpose for a dictionary. In 1859 the Unregistered Words Committee published a ‘Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society’ which declaimed in its first principle:
"The first requirement of every lexicon is that it should contain every word occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate."

It was almost thirty years until this proposal was realized in the complete Oxford English Dictionary.

This dictionary was presented to both the English King George the Fifth and the President of the United States. Though it might be noted the particular President (Calvin Coolidge) remained unnamed in the 1933 preface. The compilers of this dictionary rejected the parochialism of a national dictionary. They claimed to represent a comprehensive record of the entire language. This was the magisterial and authoritative dictionary of today’s imagination.

Yet it is important to remember that the heart of the dictionary is an argument. More it is an argument about words. Webster and the Philological Society represent two arguments in a fight over your words. In essence they are fighting over the contents of your very thoughts.

Who would have thought just picking up a dictionary could be so dangerous?

If you dare, visit the State of Oregon Law Library and take a look at copies of every edition of both the

Oxford English Dictionary and

Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language