Minority Bar Associations

Washington State lawyers join together in many different groups based on some aspects of their identities. Here's a  list of links from the Washington State Bar Association (WSBA's page also has descriptions of the organizations).

Asian Bar Association of Washington	Mother Attorneys Mentoring Association of Seattle
The Cardozo Society	Northwest Indian Bar Association
Filipino Lawyers of Washington	Pierce County Minority Bar Association
GLBT Bar Association	Slavic Bar Association of Washington
Korean American Bar Association	South Asian Bar Association of Washington
Latina/Latino Bar Association of Washington	Vietnamese American Bar Association of Washington
Loren Miller Bar Association	Washington Attorneys with Disabilities Association
Middle Eastern Legal Association of Washington	Washington Women Lawyers

The following national legal organizations are affiliated with the American Bar Association and are represented in the ABA House of Delegates. (See this page.)

Hispanic National Bar Association
National Asian Pacific American Bar AssociationNational Native American Bar AssociationNational Association of Women Judges
National Association of Women Lawyers
National Bar Association Inc.
National Conference of Women's Bar Associations
National LGBT Bar Association

Disability Readings

Associate Dean Patricia Kuszler and Christy Thompson Ibrahim, a part-time faculty member who teaches Disability Law, have published a new book, Discussions on Disability Law and Policy, Classified Stacks, KF480 .K89 2013.

This reader contains articles from many disciplines, categorized by disability studies topics. Issues include the disability rights movement, deinstitutionalization, public transportation, inclusion, homelessness, immigration, the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and supported employment.

This new book joins the earlier book that Ibrahim edited, An Anthology of Disability Literature, Classified Stacks, PN56.5.H35 D57 2011. (See earlier post.) Next month, Kuszler and Ibrahim are coming out with a third book (co-edited with Erin Moody): The U.S. Supreme Court on Disability Law Sixteen Modern Cases. Christy Ibrahim and Erin Moody are both UW law grads. Ibrahim ('98) practices disability law, including guardianship, Social Security disability, and special education law. According to her law firm's profile, she "has an older brother with Down Syndrome and a mother who is a full-time advocate for parents of children with developmental disabilities." Ibrahim was inducted into the PILA Hall of Fame in 2009 for her work establishing the Public Service Law Concentration Track. Erin Moody ('12) is currently clerking for Washington Supreme Court Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud.

Diverse Judicial Biographies and Autobiographies

Did Wednesday's panel on Diversity on the Bench get you interested in judges' lives? Consider adding a judicial biography or autobiography to your summer reading list. Here's an assortment:

• Disrobed: An Inside Look at the Life and Work of a Federal Trial Judge
  Frederic Block
  Classified Stacks (KF8775 .B56 2012)
  Publisher page 
• Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
  Melvin I. Urofsky
  Good Reads (KF8745.B67 U749 2009)
  Publisher page 
• Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion
  Seth Stern & Stephen Wermiel
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.B68 S74 2010)
  Publisher's page  
• Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era David M. Dorsen
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.F75 D67 2012)
  Publisher's page 
• Henry Frye: North Carolina's First African American Chief Justice Howard E. Covington (2013)
  Online access
  Publisher's page 
• Thurgood Marshall: Race, Rights, and the Struggle for a More Perfect Union Charles L. Zelden
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.M34 Z45 2013)
  Publisher's page 
• Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography
  Constance Baker Motley
  Classified Stacks (KF373.M64 A34 1998)
  Publisher's page 
• Sandra Day O'Connor: Justice in the Balance
  Ann Carey McFeatters
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.O25 M34 2005) and online
  Publisher  
• Reflections on Judging
  Richard A. Posner
  Classified Stacks (KF9050 .P55 2013)
  Publisher's page  
• Duke Slater: Pioneering Black NFL Player and Judge
  Neal Rozendaal (2012)
  Online access
  Publisher's page 
• American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
  Joan Biskupic
  Good Reads (KF8745.S33 B57 2009)
  Publisher's page  
• My Beloved World
  Sonia Sotomayor
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.S67 S68 2013)
  Publisher's page  
• Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir
  John Paul Stevens
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.S78 S74 2011)
  Publisher's page 
• My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
  Clarence Thomas
  Classified Stacks (KF8745.T48 A3 2007)
  Publisher's page 
• Elbert Parr Tuttle Chief Jurist of the Civil Rights Revolution
  Anne Emanuel
  Classified Stacks (KF373.T9 E46 2011) and online
  Publisher's page

Diversity in WSBA, Cal. Bar

How many Washington lawyers are people of color? gay or lesbian? living with a disability? over 60? parents? veterans?

You can learn all this (and more!) from the 2012 WSBA Membership Survey. If you've already got plenty to read (who doesn't?) check out the Executive Summary, a 13-page PDF filled with bright graphics.

WSBA Membership Study Executive Summary at 2

To dig deeper, see the full report (131 pages).

For similar data about the California bar, see Predominantly white male State Bar changing ... slowly, California Bar Journal, Jan. 2012.

Cultural Competence: Immigrant and Refugee Communities

What do you know about the Somali, Vietnamese, or Karen immigrants who might be your clients in a couple of years?

For help, let's go to the doctor—or rather, go to a website produced by Harborview Medical Center and the UW's Health Sciences Library. EthnoWeb has "medical and cultural information about immigrant and refugee groups. Information is specific to groups in the Seattle area, but much of the cultural and health information is of interest and applicable in other geographic areas."

Lawyers won't need all the material aimed at health care providers, but many of the materials are useful for anyone. For instance, Phrases of Courtesy in Nine Languages: A Tool for Medical Providers, has video clips of native speakers to teach some useful phrases. A lawyer probably won't need to say "You are in ___ Hospital," but being able to say "Hello" or "We are here to help you" would be just as helpful in legal services as in health services.

Phrases of Courtesy menu for Vietnamese

Screen snip of video for "See you next time" in Vietnamese.

Go to the Cultures page for links to information about different cultures, including Cambodian, Chin, Chinese, Eritrean, Hmong, and Somali.

EthnoWeb Cultures page

Transgender Issues

Diversity Week included a talk called "Transgender 101" yesterday afternoon. If you missed the talk (or even if you didn't), here are some organizations working on transgender legal issues:

Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (New York)
Transgender Law Center (Oakland & San Francisco)
Lambda Legal Transgender Rights page (National, headquarters in New York with four regional offices)
National Center for Transgender Equality Washington, DC)
National Center for Lesbian Rights Transgender Law page (San Francisco and Washington, DC)

The "I Am" project (at TransPeopleSpeak.org) presents several dozen short videos in which transgender people talk about their lives and their identities. You'll see the diversity within the trans community: the videos include people of different ages, races, and occupations, as well as different approaches to their transgender identities.

Diversity on the Federal Bench

This week's Diversity Week activities include a panel on "Diversity on the Bench" Wed. at 4:00. To complement that, this post offers a couple of resources specifically about federal judges.

1. FJC biographical database

The Federal Judicial Center's Biographical Directory of Federal Judges 1789 to the Present enables researchers to sort by race, gender, date nominated, and more. Here's a quick numerical overview of diversity on the federal bench:

Year nominated	Men	Women	Whites	Nonwhites*
1789-1888	356	0	356	0
1889-1988	2003	80	1971	112
1989-1998	342	108	365	85
1999-2008	291	88	306	73
2009-2013	125	92	152	113

* Search categories include African American, American Indian, Asian American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and White. The Nonwhite column is the difference between the total for a time span and the White count. With a little time, one could create a much more elaborate table, but this gives you a flavor of what the database can do as well as the changing face of the federal judiciary.

2. Video profiles

The United States Courts website includes Pathways to the Bench, short videos in which "individual judges talk about the personal, character-building challenges in their lives that prepared them to serve on the bench." You'll "meet" judges with physical disabilities (polio, MS), judges of color, and a judge who was born in a European refugee camp after World War II.

New Guide: Diversity in the Legal Profession

Our new guide, Diversity in the Legal Profession, lists books and reports about people of color, women, people with disabilities, and LGBT people in law.

Some of the books offer guidance to employers trying to foster a diverse workplace; others offer career guidance for lawyers. We even included a couple of books with a historical perspective. Take a look—and have a great Diversity Week!

Collage of covers from books in Diversity in the Legal Profession guide

Law Stories for Diversity Week

You may have read chapters of a book in the Law Stories series for one of your classes. Each book has chapters by different authors (mostly law professors) looking at the back stories and impact of famous cases. There are Law Stories collections for Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, Tax, and many other subjects. For UW Law's Diversity Week (or at any other time!), you might want to explore one or more of these Law Stories books: Indian Law Stories, Immigration Law Stories, Race Law Stories, Women and the Law Stories.

• Indian Law Stories (Carole E. Goldberg et al. eds., 2011), Reference Area(KF8205.A2 I535 2011). Includes a chapter by Prof. Robert Anderson on British Columbia First Nations land claims. For more, see this post. The chapters are:
• The Judicial Conquest of Native America: The Story of Johnson v. M'Intosh, by Lindsay G. Robertson
  
• The Tribal Struggle for Indian Sovereignty: The Story of the Cherokee Cases, by Rennard Strickland
• Water, Legal Rights, and Actual Consequences: The story of Winters v. United States, by Judith V. Royster
• Who Is an Indian?: The Story of United States v. Sandoval, by Gerald Torres
• The Distorted History That Gave Rise to the "So Called" Plenary Power Doctrine : The Story of United States v. Kagama, by Sidney L. Harring
• The Apex of Congress' Plenary Power over Indian Affairs: The story of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, by Angela R. Riley
• Erasing Indian country: The Story of Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. United States, by Joseph William Singer
• Mark the Plumber v. Tribal Empire, or Non-Indian Anxiety v. Tribal Sovereignty?: The Story of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, by Sarah Krakoff
• A Step Backward in the Government's Representation of Tribes: The story of Nevada v. United States, by Ann Carey Juliano
• Property, Power, and American "Justice": The Story of United States v. Dann, by Rebecca Tsosie
• Sheep, Sovereignty, and the Supreme Court: The Story of Williams v. Lee, by Bethany R. Berger
• What's Race Got to Do with It?: The Story of Morton v. Mancari, by Carole Goldberg
• How a $147 County Tax Notice Helped Bring Tribes More Than $200 Billion in Indian Gaming Revenue: The story of Bryan v. Itasca County, by Kevin K. Washburn
• Three Stories in One: The Story of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, by Gloria Valencia-Weber
• Challenging the Narrative of Conquest: The Story of Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, by Amy Bowers and Kristen A. Carpenter
• Beating a Path of Retreat from Treaty Rights and Tribal Sovereignty: The Story of Montana v. United States, by John P. LaVelle
• Aboriginal Title in the Canadian Legal System: The Story of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, by Robert T. Anderson
  
  
  
• Immigration Stories (David A. Martin & Peter H. Schuck eds., 2005), Reference Area (KF4819.A2 I4268 2005). Chapters are:
• Chae Chan Ping and Fong Yue Ting: The Origins of Plenary Power, by Gabriel J. Chin
• Wong Wing v. United States: The Bill of Rights Protects Illegal Aliens, by Gerald L. Neuman
• Wong Kim Ark: The Contest Over Birthright Citizenship, by Lucy E. Salyer
• Harisiades v. Shaughnessy: A Case Study in the Vulnerability of Resident Aliens
• The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello, by Daniel Kanstroom
• Afroyim: Vaunting Citizenship, Presaging Transnationality, by Peter J. Spiro
• Kleindienst v. Mandel: Plenary Power v. the Professor, by Peter H. Schuck
• Plyler v. Doe, the Education of Undocumented Children, and the Polity, by Michael A. Olivas
• Maria and Joseph Plasencia's Lost Weekend: The Case of Landon v. Plasencia, by Kevin R. Johnson
• Adelaide Abankwah, Fauziya Kasinga, and the Dilemmas of Political Asylum, by David A. Martin
• INS v. St. Cyr: The Campaign to Preserve Court Review and Stop Retroactive Deportation Laws, by Nancy Morawetz
•  Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB: The Rules of the Workplace for Undocumented Immigrants, by Catherine L. Fisk and Michael J. Wishnie
• Demore v. Kim: Judicial Deference to Congressional Folly, by Margaret H. Taylor
  
• Race Law Stories (Rachel F. Moran & Devon Carbado eds., 2008), Reference Area (KF4755 .R33 2008). Chapters are:
• The Tribal Struggle for Indian Sovereignty: The Story of the Cherokee Cases, by Rennard Strickland
• Classical Racialism, Justice Story, and Margaret Morgan's Journey from Freedom to Clavery: The Story of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.
• Birthright Citizenship, Immigration, and the U.S. Constitution: The Story of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, by Erika Lee
• "The Constitution Follows the Flag . . . but Doesn't Quite Catch up with It": The Story of Downes v. Bidwell, by Pedro A. Malavet 
• Multiracialism and the Social Construction of Race: The Story of Hudgins v. Wrights, by Angela Onwuachi-Willig
• Yellow by Law: The Story of Ozawa v. United States, by Devon W. Carbado
• What's Race Got to Do with It?: The Story of Morton v. Mancari, by Carole Goldberg
• Jim Crow, Mexican Americans, and the Anti-Subordination Constitution: The Story of Hernandez v. Texas, by Ian Haney López & Michael A. Olivas
• Dodging Responsibility: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States, by Jerry Kang
• Forgotten Lessons on Race, Law, and Marriage: The Story of Perez v. Sharp, by R.A. Lenhardt
• Judicial Opinions as Racial Narratives: The Story of Richmond v. Croson, by Reginald Oh & Thomas Ross
• The Song Remains the Same: The Story of Whren v. United States, by Kevin R. Johnson
• The Heirs of Brown: The Story of Grutter v. Bollinger, by Rachel F. Moran
• Representation and Raceblindness: The Story of Shaw v. Reno, by Daniel P. Tokaji
• Disfiguring Civil Rights to Deny Indigenous Hawaiian Self-Determination: The Story of Rice v. Cayetano, by Eric K. Yamamoto & Catherine Corpus Betts
• Intersectional Bias and the Courts: The Story of Rogers v. American Airlines, by Paulette M. Caldwell
  
• Women and the Law Stories (Elizabeth M. Schneider & Stephanie M. Wildman eds., 2011), Reference Area (KF478.5.A5 W645 2011). Chapters are:
• Hidden Histories, Racialized Gender, and the Legacy of Reconstruction: The Story of United States v. Cruikshank, by Rebecca Hall and Angela P. Harris
• "When the Trouble Started": The Story of Frontiero v. Richardson, by Serena Mayeri
• Single-Sex Public Schools: The Story of Vorchheimer v. School District of Philadelphia, by Martha Minow
• Unconstitutionally Male?: The Story of United States v. Virginia, by Katharine T. Bartlett
• Infertile by Force and Federal Complicity: The Story of Relf v. Weinberger, by Lisa C. Ikemoto
• "Nearly Allied to Her Right to Be"—Medicaid Funding for Abortion: The Story of Harris v. McRae, by Rhonda Copelon and Sylvia A. Law
• Pregnant and Working: The Story of California Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n v. Guerra, by Stephanie M. Wildman
• "What Not to Wear"—The Story of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, by Tanya Katerí Hernández
•  Of Glass Ceilings, Sex Stereotypes, and Mixed Motives: The Story of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, by Martha Chamallas
• Six Cases in Search of a Decision: The Story of In re Marriage Cases, by Patricia A. Cain and Jean C. Love
• State—Enabled Violence: The Story of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, by Zanita E. Fenton
• The Entry of Women into Wall Street Law Firms: The Story of Blank v. Sullivan & Cromwell, by Cynthia Grant Bowman
• A Tribal Court Domestic Violence Case: The Story of an Unknown Victim, an Unreported Decision, and an All Too Common Injustice, by Stacy L. Leeds

Using Database Identifiers in WestlawNext

Westlaw assigns a unique identifier to each database. If you use Westlaw Classic, you're used to seeing them when you run searches. You can use these databases in WestlawNext, too. Instead of drilling down through the menus, if you know a database identifier, just type it, followed by a colon. For example, fl-st-ann: would get you directly to the annotated Florida statutes.

Screen snip showing database identifier (in this case,
JLR for Journals & Law Reviews) in Westlaw Classic

Westlaw has standardized many database identifiers by using state postal codes. For example, the database with Washington cases is WA-CS, and the databases for Idaho, Montana, and Florida cases are ID-CS, MT-CS, and FL-CS. The database for annotated Washington statutes is WA-ST-ANN and the databases for Idaho, Montana, and Florida annotated statutes are ID-ST-ANN, MT-ST-ANN, and FL-ST-ANN.

New Display: Law ♥ Library ♥ Love

There's a new display in the cases outside the library entrance called "Law, Library, Love: Books on Marriage Law."

The theme is, you guessed it, books about the legal issues surrounding matrimony. We have old books and new; foreign and domestic; in print and online; and books in many, many different colors and sizes. Topics range from the historical studies of marriage, same sex marriage, interracial marriage, religious aspects of marriage, the role of the state in marriage, and the list goes on!

Check out the display next time you're in the library. Not going to be in the library anytime soon? Fear not! Here is a list of eBooks in our collection about marriage and law.

Starting to Dread the Approach of Finals? Try CALI Lessons!

CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, is an excellent resource for law students to use when getting ready for exams. You may know CALI for its Excellence for the Future Awards but the site also contains interactive lessons on a broad number of law school subjects. Personally, I used the site in law school during the final couple of hours before an exam, when I knew that studying my notes wasn't really going to help but still wanted to feel like I was preparing.

CALI membership is comprised of U.S. law schools and its lessons are created by the faculty at its member institutions, including a number prepared by our very own Professor William Andersen! The lessons are free to CALI member schools' students (that's you, UW Law student!).

In addition to lessons, there are crossword puzzles on family law, torts, and civil procedure. There are even a couple of games, one of which, The Supreme Court Justice Game, requires you to match the names of Supreme Court justices with their famous decisions. I bet you all know what you're doing this Saturday night!

Here's a few of the topics from list that's on their CALI Lessons front page:

1L First Year Lesson Topics:

Civil Procedure
Constitutional Law
Contracts
Criminal Law
Legal Concepts and Skills
Legal Research
Legal Writing
Property Law
Torts
Games


2L-3L Upper Level Lesson Topics

Administrative Law

Business Associations
Climate Change
Commercial Transactions
Criminal Procedure
Cyberlaw
Employment Discrimination
Environmental Law
Evidence
Family Law
Intellectual Property
International Law
Labor Law
Negotiable Instruments/Payment Systems
Patent Law
Professional Responsibility
Real Estate Transactions
Remedies
Sales
Securities
Tax Law


If you're interested (and how could you not be?!), come to the Reference Office or use our website to ask us electronically for the registration information. All UW law students are eligible for an account. 

Fast Cases at HeinOnline

You were excited and eager, and rightly so, but in case you missed the arrival of HeinOnline's newest friend Fastcase then here you go: the wait ended over winter break, new hyperlinked cases are here!

HeinOnline partners with Fastcase

Hein is hyperlinking to Fastcase cases, and the coverage includes:

• Supreme Court opinions (1754 – present) 
• Federal Circuits (1924 – present)
• Board of Tax Appeals (vols. 1 – 47)
• Tax Court Memorandum Decisions (vols. 1 – 59)
• U.S. Customs Court (vols. 1-70) 
• Board of Immigration Appeals (1996 – present)
• Federal District Courts (1924 – present)
• Federal Bankruptcy Courts (1 B.R. 1 – present) 
• State case law (all 50 states, nearly half of the states dating back to the 1800s and coverage for the remaining states dating back to approximately 1950) 

You can access these cases by clicking through hyperlinked text, or retrieve cases by citation within Hein. You'll see a brand-spanking new Fastcase tab on the Hein homepage

HeinOnline Fastcase Tab

and you'll find that same tab allows you to search for citations even when you're within a library:

HeinOnline Fastcase Tab

HeinOnline Hyperlink

And you'll get the chance to simply click through to cases as you come across them in your research; links are denoted as usual by Hein's blue highlighting.


When you click on a blue hyperlink you will remain inside the Hein site like you normally would, but with the Fastcase case link you will notice a slight difference in the formatting of your results. Hein provides replicas of original documents, but Fastcase's cases arrive reformatted to plain text.

Screenshot of a HeinOnline case

Screenshot of a Fastcase case

The difference is a departure from Hein's original images, but the convenience of more cases quickly at your fingertips may be well worth it. You'll get used to seeing some cases in Hein's original format - like early cases in the Federal Reporter or cases in the United States Reports - and others in the plain text of Fastcase.

In exchange for contributing cases, Fastcase gets links to some of Hein's libraries, like the Law Journals and Session Laws. Fastcase users will see lists of Hein results for free, with the option of accessing the full results on a subscription basis.

If you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, visit the press releases from Hein and Fastcase. And if you have questions for HeinOnline, try their new Fastcase FAQ.

Google Scholar Tip

Google Scholar can be a great tool. Who doesn't like the ease of Google searching with the incredibly broad coverage you find?

But Google Scholar doesn't give you the full text of all the articles it retrieves. Many are available only in proprietary databases. Good news! You can combine the searching of Google Scholar with the richness of the databases licensed by the UW Libraries:

1. Click on Settings 
2. Click on Library links 
3. Search for University of Washington 
4. Select and Save.

Here are screen snips to show you what to look for:

What does this do for you? Now when you run a search in Google Scholar, you automatically get links to the articles that are available in databases from the University Libraries.