For years if you wanted to buy a copy of Oregon's laws you had no choice but to buy it from the office of Legislative Counsel of the State of Oregon. A full set of 21 softbound volumes costs $356. Known simply as "ORS," standing for Oregon Revised Statutes, nearly every lawyer's office has a set. The volumes have a hit-or-miss index and a spotty set of annotations (hidden in an end volume), but are reasonably priced as law books go.
A few years ago, West Publishing, the behemoth of the legal publishing world now owned by a Canadian firm, decided to publish its own set of Oregon laws, called Oregon Revised Statutes Annotated, or "ORSA." The "Annotated" means that the books include not only the statutes themselves but also summaries of cases that apply or interpret the statutes. So if you look up (say) ORS 156.100 in ORS, you get the statute itself and not much more, but if you look it up in ORSA, you get not only the statute but one-paragraph summaries of every Oregon case that applies or interprets that statute.
Oregon isn't a big market for legal books, and with two publishers vying for the market the competition is heating up. Someone in the office of Legislative Counsel has a sense of humor about its fight with West Publishing, for the current online advertisement for ORS says not only that ORS is the only official version of Oregon law, but also that:
Just having this extraordinarily impressive-looking set in your office will make you smarter and even more attractive.* Also restores hair loss.* If you'd like to exercise your biceps with your brain, a foreign company sells an unofficial 40-Volume hardbound set of laws copied from the one we publish.
Why the asterisks for those two bold claims? Alas, the LC's office is full of lawyers, and the footnote demurely says that the two sentences with the asterisks are "probably not at all true."