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Search slip opinions of the Oregon Supreme Court, Oregon Court of Appeals, and Oregon Tax Court, from 1998 through April 2, 2009 for the Oregon Supreme Court and through April 1, 2009 for the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Easy search
Click in the check box to agree to the terms and conditions, then type a word or words of interest in the box above, then click on the Go! button.
For example, enter the word “easement” (without the quotation marks) and click on the Submit button. You will get back your query with a list of cases. The search engine uses a statistical analysis to rank the matching cases for you.
Phrases
To search for a phrase, put the phrase in quotation marks, as in “ballot title”.
If you forget to put parentheses around the phrase “ballot title”, then you will get all the cases that use the word “title” including car title cases and real estate title cases. Many irrelevant cases. When there are no quotation marks around the words, the search engine assumes that you want every case that includes the given words even if not together in the case.
Read the cases found
You can click on the case number and read the opinion. Use right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Mac) to open the opinion in a new tab, much more convenient for referring back to the search results.
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Boolean search
Most searches will be done by simply putting words into the box. But if you get too many cases, or need to make a more complicated search, you will want to use Boolean search terms in the box. This will allow exclusion of cases with certain words and other conditions
Boolean queries allow the following special operators to be used:
For AND use “&” (without the quotes).
For OR use “|” (without the quotes). This is not the lower case L “l” or number one “1? character, this is the pipe character, a vertical line usually found above the “\” key on the right of your keyboard.
For NOT use “-” or “!” (without the quotes).
For GROUPING enclose the terms in parentheses. Grouping is used for some very specialized searches.
Here are some examples:
* explicit operator AND: hello & world
* operator OR: hello | world
* operator NOT: hello -world [or the same thing: hello !world ]
* grouping: ( hello world )
Here is an example of a Boolean search query which uses all these operators:
( cat -dog ) | ( cat -mouse)
The AND operator is always implied, so “hello world” query (witout the quotation marks) actually searches for the same thing as “hello & world” (without the quotation marks).
OR operator precedence is higher than AND, so “looking for cat | dog | mouse” means “looking for ( cat | dog | mouse )” and not “(looking for cat) | dog | mouse”. That is, the search will return opinion that satisfy any one or more of these 3 conditions: “looking for cat”, “looking for dog”, or “looking for mouse”.
Queries like “-dog”, that is, search for every opinion that does not not include the word “dog”, might include every single case. To prevent this, such a search will not be accepted by the system.
No Wildcard: No wildcard is provided for this search. Longer words that include what you enter, will be returned. For example, “employ” will search for employ, employer, employee, employment. Also, words with the same word root will be returned. For example, “employer” will return “employee”.
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Questions?: If you have any questions or feedback, please use the contact email form.
Of course, no warranty is intended by providing this service. Traditional means should be used to verify any opinion language before it is used or relied upon. Any non-lawyer who may access this page is warned: consult a lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you may call the Oregon State Bar’s Lawyer Referral Service at 503-684-3763 or visit the Lawyer Referral web page.
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by SimmonsTrialPractice.com