While foot traffic has picked up in the courthouse, we know many of you are just not coming downtown like you used to. With that in mind, the law library has made a concerted effort to expand remote access to our collection materials whenever possible.

We received a wonderful book donation to the law library the other day. Washington’s Historical Courthouses is a fascinating pictorial journey into Washington’s legal history through the lens of the state’s county courthouses. Author Ray Graves practiced law for over 50 years, primarily in Tacoma. But during his long career, he had occasion to appear in nearly half of Washington’s 39 county courthouses.

I find history fascinating. For historical scholarly research, JSTOR is absolutely my favorite database. While I don’t get to dig into historical scholarship very often for my work now, I still get my fix through JSTOR Daily, a daily newsletter with “original, research-backed articles that help you understand the world.” While the main JSTOR database is behind academic institution paywalls, JSTOR Daily articles allow free access to underlying scholarship. I frequently find my interest piqued by a newsletter article and dig deeper into the subject. Often, there’s a clear through-line that runs from a historical narrative discussed in a JSTOR Daily article to what’s currently happening. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
 

Articles about lawyers using artificial intelligence tend to fall into two general categories—either mocking the Luddites for not embracing the future of legal practice or engaging in schadenfreude at lawyers ensnared in AI’s hallucinated citations. Both views make solid points.

Immigration has always been a hot button issue but the new administration’s promises to launch a mass deportation program at “lightning speed” has pushed the issue front and center. 

Arthur Beardsley was the founding director of the University of Washington’s Law Library. He served in that position from 1922–1944 and during his tenure built the collection to over 100,000 volumes with a strong foreign law emphasis including English, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese concentrations. He founded the University of Washington’s law librarianship program and left his footprint on generations of law libraries. Beardsley was also a scholar, archivist, and historian. During his tenure at UW, he compiled a vast archive of materials on early Washington legal luminaries. As a student, I remember going down to the scary, dark basement of the law library at Condon Hall and seeing the file cabinets that held what was called the bench and bar files. Each legal luminary had a file folder with news clippings, correspondence, photographs, and various other ephemera tucked in. One could easily lose track of time sifting through all those bits of history—despite being in a dark, scary basement.

In the world of legal research, it seems that change is the only constant. For those of you who are regular Fastcase users through the WSBA’s platform you may have noticed that things look a bit different lately. Fastcase merged with vLex to create vLex/Fastcase. While you may not be familiar with vLex, (they didn’t have a big market share in the US prior to the merger) it is one of the fastest-growing legal tech companies internationally. vLex was founded in Spain and is a major player in foreign and international law research. With the merger, vLex/Fastcase claim to have formed “the world’s largest law firm subscriber base with more than one billion legal documents from more than 100 countries.”

The other day an attorney patron came in looking for sample language for a very specific type of employment agreement. Using the form sets in our collection we were able to quickly find sample clauses for that particular situation.

The law is a tradition-bound endeavor. Judicial decisions are constrained by long-established precedent (well, at least they used to be) as are the workings of the court. An attorney visiting the King County Law Library when it was first established in 1919 would not have felt too out of place in the law library (or courthouse) of 2019. Then came the pandemic [cue the sound of a record scratch] and we were all thrust into the future. Unlike public libraries, who had embraced eBook collections years ago, public law libraries were still tied to print collections. But not for lack of trying. For years I, and other law librarians, lobbied legal publishers to allow our patrons to check out eBooks and were always met with a resounding no. With the onset of the pandemic, Lexis quickly pivoted and created remote eBook access for public law library patrons. It was a game changer for KCLL and we proceeded to change the composition of our collection from almost exclusively print to primarily digital.

As anyone who has ever worked in a library knows, there will always be that person who, upon finding out that one works in a library, comments, “That must be so great, I’d love to just sit around and read all day. “Ummm…. yeah… not in any public law library that I know …. but sure, most of us give a polite nod and refrain from an overly sarcastic eyeroll. That said, libraries do attract people who love books and yes, we do spend a lot of our free time reading them. In this month’s column you can get a bird’s eye view into what the law library and foundation staff are currently reading.