Wilcox v. Board of Parole & Post-Prison Supervision

Implicit in today’s opinion is the majority’s desire to conserve judicial resources by avoiding the need to address the merits of what it believes to be meritless claims. To do that, it misinterprets the phrase “adversely affected or aggrieved” in ORS 144.335 to raise a jurisdictional bar to petitioner’s claim. The interpretation that it gives that phrase is not one that it would give the phrase in any of the other Oregon statutes in which the phrase appears. Ultimately, if the statutes and rules as written create the potential for the waste of judicial resources, that problem must be…