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Over the weekend, Dean Fowell, a high school soccer coach in Hillsboro, Oregon, was arrested on charges that he sexually abused a 16-year-old girl on the team. The girl apparently reported to police on Saturday that the coach had engaged her in repeated sexual contact spanning over the past two years.  Dean Fowell is charged with rape, sex abuse and furnishing alcohol to a minor. According to reports, Fowell had been “grooming” the girl, having met her when she was 9 years old.

 

The “vested rights” standard for allowing the completion of development under Measure 49 has been a brutal exercise in legal procedure for many Measure 37 claimants.  M49 was supposed to allow the completion of M37 development where the claimants had established a common law vested right.  The problem was, the standard for establishing a common law vested right based on sunk costs was only discussed in a single Oregon supreme court case.  From 1973.

To those who have been reading this blog, my apologies. This fall was one of the busiest times in the last ten years of practicing law. I will try to catch up on some of the recent decisions over the last few months. There’s a very brief case overview (of a very long decision) coming right after this one. Please check back over the next few days and weeks.

As Ronald Reagan famously quipped, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" This may be especially true for businesses who, in addition to jumping through governmental hoops, also have to contend with the recession and weary buyers. One such Oregon business decided to fight back against governmental abuse of power and filed a lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for deprivation of its constitutional rights.

Can a legitimate divorce nevertheless effect a fraudulent transfer? On September 28, 2011, the Oregon Court of Appeals issued its decision in Fadel v. El-Tobgy, A141215, a case in which a man who had wrongfully squandered his ailing and dependent mother’s fortune was sued for transferring his property to his ex-wife in a divorce.

The case of Estate of Maria Refugio Ibarra v. Lilly, A146268, http://www.publications.ojd.state.or.us/A146268.pdf (Or. Ct. App. August 31, 2011), involved an accident in which a minivan crashed into a log truck.  Although the jury found the logging company negligent, the jury returned a verdict for $0 in non-economic damages, and awarded some economic damages.  However, in Oregon, economic damages cannot be awarded unless non-economic damages are also awarded.  Edmonds v.

We filed a lawsuit in Montana today against the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and the Montana Council of the Boy Scouts on behalf of five women who were raped and sexually abused by their Boy Scout leader in the 1970s, when they were 11 to 15 years old.  The man was criminally convicted in Kalispell in 1976 for raping numerous girls affiliated with Scouting, including three of the women filing suit today.  See news stories

"But is it legal?" This is by far and away the most common question I am asked after doing a workshop on local food systems and profitable farming principles. So begins Joel Salatin in Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front . And no, he is not talking about growing pot or smuggling in truckloads of undocumented workers.

Is threatening to disclose someone’s sexually transmitted disease (genital herpes) on social media grounds for a domestic violence restraining order, particularly after they have admitted giving it to the person doing the disclosing? One might think that admitting to a battery (sexual contact while falsely concealing a venereal disease) would stop most people from filing a lawsuit against the person to whom they gave the disease. Not so.