How to Find and Cite Oregon Law

ORS 418.035 stopped existing in 2007. What it said didn't stop existing, because Oregon moved the whole section to ORS 412.001 and left the words alone.

Oregon does that a lot. 8,800 sections of the Oregon Revised Statutes are marked renumbered, next to 24,599 marked repealed. Put together, 33,399 of the state's 72,664 statute sections are no longer current law, which is 46% of the book, and 39,265 are in force. The renumbered pile is the part that will fool you, because a renumbered section is still law. It simply lives at a different address.

Who publishes what

The Legislative Counsel Committee publishes the Oregon Revised Statutes under ORS 171.275, and a new edition lands every two years. The 2025 edition runs to 23 volumes. Nineteen of them hold statute text, two hold the general index, one holds the comparative section tables and one holds the annotations supplement. The statute text is Oregon's general and permanent law in effect on January 1, 2026.

The office that assembles it works under a tight limit. The Legislative Counsel has no general authority to revise. ORS 173.160 lists the changes it may make to the form of an enrolled Act, and none of them may alter the sense, meaning, effect or substance of the Act. Giving an existing section a new ORS number is on that list, for when material gets reorganized. So a renumbering can happen as an editorial act by the people who print the book, without a separate vote naming the new number.

The rules side belongs to someone else. The Secretary of State compiles, indexes and publishes every rule each agency adopts, under ORS 183.360, and that compilation supersedes any other rules. It is titled the Oregon Administrative Rules and cited as OAR. The same statute hands the Secretary of State a power to renumber rules under the same limit about not altering substance. A bulletin comes out at least monthly with what changed, and courts take judicial notice of rules filed with that office.

The citation form is shorter than you expect

For a statute, write ORS and the section number. Oregon's own instructions say no other citation is necessary. No section symbol, no year, no publisher. Subsections go in parentheses after the number, like ORS 619.026 (2)(b).

The digits carry structure. Left of the decimal point is the chapter, right of it is the position inside that chapter. Chapters run progressively rather than consecutively, which leaves room for later editions to slot in new chapters without renumbering the ones already there. Some chapters also pick up a letter, like chapter 72A.

Rules take three numbers. Read OAR 137-003-0501 as chapter 137, division 003, rule 0501. That one belongs to the Attorney General's model rules for contested cases, and chapter 137 on the rules side means the Department of Justice.

Now the trap. ORS chapter 137 is about judgment, execution, parole and probation. OAR chapter 137 is the Department of Justice. Same three digits, two unrelated books. Oregon never lined the two numbering systems up, so a matching chapter number tells you nothing at all.

Read the brackets

Every ORS section ends with a bracketed source note, and the status lives in there.

A repealed section keeps its number in the book. The bracket names the act that created the section and the act that killed it. Oregon also never reuses a repealed number in a later edition, so an ORS number will not come back one day meaning something else.

A renumbered section reads differently. At the old number you find renumbered 284.122 in 2007, which says where the content went and when it left. At the new number you find Formerly 91.766, pointing back the other way. Since the 1989 edition those notes carry the year of the move, and that year is what makes an old cite datable.

Whole chapters move as well. A chapter that has been entirely repealed or renumbered drops out of the tables of titles and chapters, and a page sits in its old spot saying what became of the contents.

So you are holding an old ORS number

Say a 2006 agreement cites ORS 418.035 and the number now returns nothing. How many of the ORS cites in your own templates were written before 2007?

1. Read the bracket at the old number first. Renumbered or repealed is the whole question, and the note answers it in one line.
2. If it was renumbered, go to the new number and read forward from there. The law kept running the entire time.
3. If you need the words as they read back then, pull that chapter from the earlier edition of ORS, or the Oregon Laws volume for the year the change was made.
4. For a bulk job, volume 22 carries the comparative section tables, which is the old-to-new map for the whole book.
5. Fix your cross references, because Oregon already fixed its own. When ORS 310.692 became ORS 307.248 in 2015, the reference sitting inside ORS 307.244 was rewritten to match. Your brief was not.

What the counts look like

These come from a US primary law corpus maintained by Vaquill AI, measured on 2026-09-18. Oregon holds 114,770 sections.

• Statutes: 72,664, of which 39,265 are in force
• Regulations: 40,869
• Court rules: 632
• Constitution: 388
• Attorney General opinions: 114
• Agency guidance: 103

Look at how lopsided the two big books are. Only 3 of those 40,869 regulation sections are reserved and the rest are in force, while the statute side reads 46% dead. That gap is housekeeping, not history. The statute book keeps a retired number on the page with a note attached. The rules compilation gets revised as often as necessary and supersedes anything else, so what you are left with is close to a pure in-force list.

Two more things that bite

The printed edition is a snapshot on a two-year clock. The 2025 edition does not carry the 2025 special session or the 2026 regular session, and those land in the 2027 edition, out in early 2028. Until then the edition on its own is not the current law, and you read the session laws beside it.

Bills also arrive without ORS numbers. A section of a 2025 act stays section 2 of that act until the Legislative Counsel compiles it and assigns it a number. Section 2 of chapter 253, Oregon Laws 2009, became ORS 267.387 that way. If you are tracking a brand new Oregon law before the next edition, you are tracking a chapter and section of Oregon Laws, and there is no ORS cite to give anyone yet.

So when an Oregon section number comes back empty, ask where it went before you decide it died.

Facts used

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.