Farewell to Justice Stevens

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has died. His latest memoir, The Making of  a Justice,  just came out this year:

Before you dig into the 549-page book, you can read about him in the National Law Journal (thanks to our license for campus-wide access):

Marcia Coyle, Justice John Paul Stevens, Who 'Left Us a Better Nation,' Dies at 99, Nat'l L.J. (July 16, 2019, 9:16 PM)

Marcia Coyle, Former Stevens Clerks Tell Us Their Strongest Memories of 'One of a Kind' Mentor, Nat'l L.J. (July 17, 2019, 10:16 AM)

To see and hear Justice Stevens in interviews and lectures, visit this C-SPAN page.

In addition to the Court and the Constitution, Justice Stevens also loved baseball. As a boy, he saw Babe Ruth play and decades later he saw his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, win the World Series.



Books by Justice Stevens:

The Making of  a Justice: Reflections on my First 94 Years (2019)

with William N. Eskridge Jr., Interpreting Law: A Primer on How to Read Statutes and the Constitution (2016)

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (2014)

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir (2011)

The Bill of Rights: A Century of Progress (1992)

A 2012 symposium on the legacy of Justice Stevens in the Northwestern University Law Review includes a personal tribute by Professor Kathryn Watts, who was one of his clerks.

To see Justice Stevens's many law review articles (and forewords, tributes, lectures, and so on), go the Law Journal Library in HeinOnline and search for john paul stevens as author.

Summer #BookBingoNW2019 is here!

Many of us are enjoying Adult Book Bingo, from the Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures. You can pick up a bingo card from the display outside our library entrance or download one here.

You have easy access to all the books in Summit (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho college libraries) as well as Seattle Public Library, and your own personal collections. Reading in many subjects and genres is great, for lots of reasons. But if you wanted to, you could make a lot of Bingos with just books from the law library, and I have three examples for you.

International #JokeDay

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Cal.
Cal who?
Calendar says it's International Joke Day!

To celebrate, check out our links to humor about law reviews or our Judicial Humor guide.

Of course, humor isn't always fun for everyone—or appropriate in a judicial setting. See, e.g., Lucas K. Hori, BonsMots, Buffonery, and the Bench: The Role of Humor in Judicial Opinions, 60 UCLA L. Rev. Discourse 16; Steven Lubet, Bullying from the Bench, 5 Green Bag 2d 11 (2001).

Surely you've heard a number of lawyer jokes. (Maybe your cranky uncle tells you a new one every time you mention law school.) To read about the history and sociology of lawyer jokes, check out Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture, by Marc Galanter; it's also available as an ebook from UW Libraries.