It looks like Nick Kallen’s wildly popular has_finder plugin will be making its way into Rails 2.x in the form of named_scope. Observe: class User < ActiveRecord::Base named_scope :active, :conditions => {:active => true} named_scope :inactive, :conditions => {:active => false} named_scope :recent, lambda { { :conditions => ['created_at > ?', 1.week.ago] } } end # Standard usage User.active # same