Vintage Law Library Experience

Do you prefer the warm, rich sound of  vinyl records to the precise yet cold sound you get from digital media? Will you go out of your way to get a luscious heirloom tomato from a produce stand, when the local supermarket has plenty of industrially farmed tomatoes on offer? Then our new law library suite is for you!

After extensive renovation, the law library has devoted Floor L3 to creating a vintage law library experience for connoisseurs like you. 

 

The Condon Reading Room

John T. Condon
Photo by William F. Boyd,
Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons

The heart of Floor L3 is the Condon Reading Room, named for John T. Condon, the first dean of UW Law. Here you can experience the law library the way previous generations did. Absorb the wisdom of scholars by reading print books without the distraction of email pop-ups or pings alerting you to new text messages. In fact, you can leave your digital devices in your locker, because we brought in a tech team to disable any wifi signals that might leak through from other floors. 

Follow in the intellectual footsteps of law students and lawyers from the last century. Do you want to find cases? Use the West Key Number System in print digests.

Shelves of Decennial Digests, with title page from volume 11 of the Sixth Decennial Digest, covering cases from 1946 to 1956 with Key Numbers in the Topics Declaratory Judgment through Divorce (Key Number 259).  "A Complete Digest of All Decisions of the State and Federal Courts as Reported in the National Reporter System and the State Reports"

Do you want to find out whether your case has been cited by later cases, perhaps even overruled? Take a look at the amazingly powerful Shepard’s Citations volumes. You’ll find that just a few minutes of study acquaint you with the treatment codes (you don’t need colored flags and traffic signals!). Before long, you will be able to make sense out of the columns of numbers and letters. Citation checking that would have eaten up minutes of your time using KeyCite or Shepards on Lexis can now be accomplished in only an hour or so.

Entries from Shepard’s Pacific
Citations.
Source: Tina S. Ching,
 Using Shepard’s Citations
in Print. (This PowerPoint 
presentation is undated,
but it’s not recent.)

No scanners are available in the Condon Reading Room, but you’ll find that copying selected passages by hand into your notebook actually improves comprehension and retention. (How many times have you downloaded or scanned a document but never gotten around to reading it?)

The Lomen Room and the Smith Room

In addition to the Condon Reading Room, Floor L3 also features two (mostly) soundproofed typing rooms, so you’ll be able to prepare your papers without disrupting your classmates (much). The typewriters in one room are manual, while the other room has IBM Selectrics from the 1970s.

The first room is named for Lucile Lomen (class of 1944).  Lomen was the first woman to clerk for a U.S. Supreme Court Justice (William O. Douglas). While she was a law student, she was an editor of the Washington Law Review and published five pieces of her own (without a laptop!). 

Washington Law Review staff. Lomen is third from left.
Source: 1943 Tyee (University of Washington yearbook), 
digitized by University Libraries

 

The second typing room—for those who prefer electric typewriters—honors Charles Z. Smith (class of 1955). Smith, who served as a trial judge and founded UW Law’s clinical program, was the first person of color to serve on the Washington Supreme Court (his father was Black and his mother was Cuban). He also produced a lot of work without a computer. (You can see his portrait on Floor 1, outside Room 133.)

Typescript of "The Judicial Function in the Criminal Justice System,"
presented by Charles Z. Smith to the National College of District Attorneys meeting
in Houston in 1971, when he was a judge on the King County Superior Court

The Johnson Room

Do you need to make a phone call? Use the Johnson Room, also on L3. Named for Professor Ralph W. Johnson, who was an expert in Indian law as well as natural resources law, the Johnson Room is equipped with a sturdy rotary-dial phone. There are also scratch pads and pencils for jotting notes or doodling.

Prof. Ralph W. Johnson. Source: University of Washington School of Law Yearbook 1965, at 10

A Law Library Experience That's New (to You)

Electronic media suffuse modern life, and legal education is no exception. From scans of first-week assignments to an online exam archive, from online study aids to classes on Zoom, law school is so shaped by digital media that it might be hard to imagine learning and researching the law in any other way. Visit Floor L3 to get a taste of vintage legal study. Maybe you won't find it as delicious as heirloom tomatoes, but it's surprisingly nourishing!