The library’s newest podcast has been released!  Join us for our third installment of “Supreme Court Classics”, where we learn about the career of Thurgood Marshall.

Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American Justice to serve on the United States Supreme Court. As a Constitutional Lawyer, Marshall is in class of his own. As chief counsel for the NAACP, Marshall successfully argued his case in Brown v. Board of Education, which changed not only American Jurisprudence forever, but also changed American Culture and Society forever. Without Marshall’s extraordinary advocacy in Brown, such legislation as the Civil Rights of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, may not have been possible. Appointed to the High Court in 1967, Marshall retired in 1991 at the age of 83. This capped a legal career that probably will never be matched in American History.

One of the goals of this program is to “increase access to justice for moderate-income residents of Washington State through reduced-fee legal assistance. The Program will serve individuals and families with incomes between 200% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. For example, the maximum annual income for an income-eligible household of one is approximately $21,000 and for a household of four is approximately $89,000. By providing legal assistance to this under-served population, lawyers participating in the Moderate Means Program will prevent Washington families from falling into poverty.”  For additional information about the program, as well as information on how to volunteer, you can go to the WSBA website here.

 This podcast is the first in a series titled Supreme Court Classics. This series will take a look at just a few of the notable justices who served on the High Court and how their influence is still felt today.

Sweet! It's Construction Law! Photo by Annah Ray

Every year since 2005, the American Association of Law Libraries hosts a photo contest titled “Day in the Life” which gives librarians and library staff an opportunity to photograph their daily tasks.  This year, our photograph titled ”Sweet! It’s Construction Law,” by Annah Ray, placed third in the category Librarians as Expert Researchers. 

This is KCLL’s third win in the “Day in the Life” contest, having recevied the overall prize and another third place award in 2005 for photos taken by Tina Ching.

For one day, Saturday, April 9, King County will open two Community Service Centers to accommodate residents who might not otherwise be able to apply for a passport in person during the work day standard hours.  No appointment is necessary and expedited services will be made available for an additional fee. 

For time and locations of these Community Centers, you can find additional information here.

We start in 1869, when women were granted the right to vote in Wyoming (in territory elections only,) and Arabella Mansfield is granted admission to practice law in Iowa, making her the first woman lawyer.  A year later, Ada H. Kepley, of Illinois, graduates from the Union College of Law in Chicago. She is the first woman lawyer to graduate from a law school.

Ten years after Kepley graduated from law school, Gertrude Rush was born in Kansas State and would later move to Iowa, where she would become the first African-American lawyer in Iowa.  Following her husband’s death in 1921, she won election as president of the Colored Bar Association and became the first woman in the nation leading a state bar association that included both male and female members.

It was around this time that the Nineteenth Amendment is ratified, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”  Ten years after this passage, Sandra Day O’Connor was born in El Paso, TX.  She would later go on to graduate from Stanford Law School and become well-known as the first female United States Supreme Court Justice in 1981 until her retirement in 2006. 

For more information about International Women’s Day, you can click here.

For more information on this topic, you can go to the Seattle PI blog.  You can also set up Bill Tracking to track the progress of this bill by going to the State Legislature’s website here.  For general information about Washington Infraction and Traffic Law, you can search the Law Library’s catalog online.

From the University of Washington’s newsletter A&S Perspectives,  ”[t]he authors were curious to learn whether compulsory civic engagement makes citizens more likely to vote.  That led them to study jury service, a well-documented example of required civic engagement.”  The researchers matched juror’s names to voting records in counties across the nation, including Thurston and King County in Washington.  Ultimately, the team reviewed the voting of records of more than 13,000 people who had been called for jury service, and found that, among other things, those jurors who were allowed to deliberate were more likely to vote than those that did not.

For full text of the article on this study, you can click here.  

For more about this research, visit jurydemocracy.org.