About Oregon.Legal

The law binds everyone. That is the entire premise of a legal system. A person can be divorced, separated from their children, ordered to pay support, fined, arrested, or imprisoned under rules they have never read, and "I did not know" has never been a defense.

In return for that, the state owes the public exactly one thing: the law, published in a form a person can actually use.

Oregon does not deliver it.

The Oregon Revised Statutes appear online as long, unbroken walls of text. When one statute refers to another, the reference is not a link. When a statute is implemented by an administrative rule, nothing connects them. The administrative rules live in a separate database, run by a different office, behind a different interface. Court rules sit somewhere else again. Each of Oregon's 27 judicial districts posts its own local rules as a standalone PDF, in 27 different places, in 27 different formats, and those local rules govern what actually happens in the courtroom you are standing in.

Every word of it is public. Almost none of it is usable.

Lawyers work around this. We have subscription research services, training, and years of practice at knowing where things are buried. The barrier is not built for us, and we are not the ones it stops.

It stops the father in eastern Oregon served with a custody petition and a deadline to respond, who needs a chapter of the statutes, a statewide court rule, and a local rule contained in a PDF he has no reason to know exists. It stops the parent trying to determine what support the law actually requires of him. It stops the person charged with a crime who wants to know the maximum sentence he is facing and cannot locate the provisions that answer it. It stops the person who cannot afford counsel, the person hours from the nearest law library, and the person who has been told that the law is knowable if you simply look it up. It stops most people, most of the time.

We talk about access to justice as though it begins with lawyers. It begins earlier than that. It begins with whether an ordinary person can read the rules they are being judged by. A law that cannot be found is not meaningfully public, and a public that cannot follow its own law is not being governed by consent — it is being governed on the honor system, by institutions that publish the minimum and call it access.

Oregon was never going to fix this. Not because anyone opposed it, but because publishing statutes online technically satisfies the requirement, and nobody in Salem is measured on whether a self-represented litigant in Ontario or Coquille can follow a citation from a statute to the rule that implements it. The work is unglamorous, unfunded, and belongs to no single agency.

So we did it. Oregon.Legal is that material rebuilt the way it should have been published in the first place. Every statute, rule, and provision has its own page and its own permanent address. Every citation is a working link. Where a statute cites another statute, the two are connected. Where an administrative rule implements a statute, both pages show the relationship, in both directions. Anyone can follow the law from a statute, to the rule that implements it, to the court rule that governs how it is litigated, to the local rule that applies in the county where the case is filed — without leaving the site, opening a PDF, or knowing in advance that any of those other sources exist.

It is free. There is no advertising, no paywall, no account, and no limit on use. Copy from it, cite it, link to it, print it. It is the law. It was always supposed to be yours.

What is published here

• Oregon Revised Statutes — the codified laws of Oregon
• Oregon Administrative Rules — agency rules implementing those statutes
• Oregon Rules of Civil Procedure
• Uniform Trial Court Rules — statewide court rules
• Supplementary Local Rules — for all 27 judicial districts, covering all 36 Oregon counties

How it is produced

The text on this site is reproduced from official sources without alteration. It is not summarized, paraphrased, rewritten, or edited for readability.

Each source document is downloaded from its official publisher and preserved as an unmodified archival copy. Automated processing extracts each provision from that copy and produces the page you are reading. Before anything is published, the text on the page is compared back against the archived source and must match exactly. A provision that fails that comparison is not published.

The process is also checked for completeness. The number of provisions extracted from each chapter must equal the number that chapter's own table of contents lists. Where those numbers disagree, the chapter is held back and examined rather than published. This check exists because silent omission is the most dangerous failure a legal reference can have: a missing statute looks exactly like a statute that does not exist.

Every page identifies the official source it came from, the edition, the effective date where the source provides one, and the date the text was last verified. Every page links to the official source so any provision can be confirmed at its origin.

Currentness

Oregon.Legal is not the official text of Oregon law, and it is not a substitute for it.

The Oregon Revised Statutes are published in editions. The current edition does not incorporate changes made in legislative sessions after its publication. Where the Legislature identifies a chapter as affected by a later session, that notice appears on the affected pages, along with links to the session laws. Later amendments are never silently merged into the codified text shown here — a reader is told what edition they are reading and what has happened since.

Administrative rules change on a rolling basis. Court rules are amended annually and between cycles. Nothing published here should be relied upon without confirming it against the official source linked on the page.

Corrections

If you find an error — a missing provision, a text discrepancy, a broken link, or anything that does not match the official source — please write to contact@oregon.legal. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send.

Who maintains this

Oregon.Legal is compiled and maintained by Michael G. Romano, an Oregon trial lawyer, and published by Romano Law, P.C., a Portland law firm. It is free, contains no advertising, and requires no account.

How this reference is built

Every source document — a chapter of the statutes, a division of administrative rules, a court's local rules — is downloaded from its official publisher and preserved as an unaltered archival copy. Nothing is edited, summarized, or paraphrased at this stage.

Automated processing then extracts each individual provision from that archived copy: its identifier, its title, its exact text, and its citations to other provisions. Before anything is published, the extracted text is compared back against the archived source, and it must match exactly. Separately, the number of provisions extracted from each source document is checked against that document's own table of contents. A document that fails either check is held back rather than published — a missing or altered provision is worse than a missing page, because it looks correct until someone relies on it.

Citations between provisions — a statute referencing another statute, an administrative rule implementing a statute, a court rule referencing a local rule — are identified by the same automated process and turned into the links you see throughout the site. Every page also links back to its official source, so anything here can be checked at the origin.