Hula Hula Boys

Don't seem to want too many civilians attending their luau. I've spent the last few weeks trying to locate an online source for many of the important Oregon Supreme Court cases published before 1998. Starting in 1998, the Court started making its "slip opinions" available online so that anyone with a computer could access them. However, the court has not itself made earlier decisions available electronically. They are available through several subscription sources -- Lexis Nexis for one, CaseMaker for another. Unfortunately, if you aren't a subscriber or belong to a subscriber institution (like PSU, for example), Lexis Nexis is off limits, while CaseMaker is available only to members of the Oregon State Bar. So, while I can access some of these cases because I'm affiliated with PSU, I can't make them available publicly. Fortunately, Ron Ledbury, a Portland curmudgeon with legal/political/economic training and who has a variety of axes to grind, (and an amicus filer in Strunk), *has* made them available on a website he hosts http://law.pdxlawg.us/cases/ (I am grateful to Ron for making the site available - and I fully endorse his efforts to make them more widely available - but I don't want anyone to mistake my link as an endorsement of the rest of his causes). It can be a challenge to find the cases on his site, but if you know the citation (typically you need to have seen them cited in a legal brief or ruling by case/chapter number, e.g. OR 306), they are reasonably easy to find. Ron's site covers Oregon Supreme Court rulings from 1976 - 1998 and includes *most* of the important PERS cases - Eccles, Hughes, OSPOA and others. If you want to understand the case history that the Supreme Court has staked out on PERS, it is worthwhile to review these cases. If nothing else, you'll get a better understanding of why each side in the current dispute cites these cases for different reasons.

Tomorrow, unless more interesting news takes precedence, I'll try to provide direct links from here to some of the important PERS cases on Ron's site. In the meantime, happy hunting.