Topic: Law
Former Teamsters Union leader Dave Beck (1894-1993) was tried in federal court in Tacoma on charges of income-tax evasion. Murray Morgan (1916-2000) covered the trial for his daily radio news program....
Robert C. Nickels gave up a comfortable career at Boeing to found a successful nonprofit law firm dedicated to representing children who needed an advocate in King County Juvenile Court. He did so at ...
Pinball machines were introduced nearly a century ago and immediately became wildly popular. Unlike today's versions, though, early pinball games were played for gambling purposes, which proved to be ...
John Edmondson Prim was the first African American to serve as deputy prosecuting attorney for King County and the first African American judge in the state.
Five years before the 18th Amendment kicked off national Prohibition, Washington voters approved a state initiative banning the sale and manufacture of alcohol. Within days of this new state law, a th...
In the mid-1970s, civil rights advocates painted a red line on the street in Seattle's Central District, running along 14th Avenue from Yesler Way north to Union Street. The protest action aimed to dr...
Lelia Robinson is a celebrated feminist pioneer in American legal history. Among her achievements, she was the first woman to earn admission to the Massachusetts State Bar. While those who know of Rob...
William E. Barr wrote this account of an early environmental lawsuit brought by a Spokane-area citizen that alleged air pollution for the Autumn 1987 issue of The Pacific Northwesterner. It is reprint...
The Seattle Liberation Front (SLF) was one of the more flamboyant, if short-lived, radical organizations to rise out of the student movement of the 1960s. Organized in January 1970 by University of Wa...
Elizabeth Shackleford, a lifelong Tacoman, was a lawyer and judge in her hometown for 60 years. She was the second female justice of the peace in Pierce County and for several years the only female la...
Washington resident Frank Shaffer was a storekeeper, postmaster, farmer, inventor, and member of the International Bible Students Association in Everett. He was also involved in two important court ca...
Charles Z. Smith was the first African American and the first person of color to serve on the Washington State Supreme Court. He was appointed by Governor Booth Gardner (1936-2013) in 1988, and was th...
Elmer Stuart Smith was a central figure in the Centralia Massacre that occurred on November 11, 1919. Smith had advised a group of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) members that they had a right t...
Palmer Smith, a Seattle lawyer for more than 40 years, was a passionate advocate for the rule of law, social justice, civil rights, and education. He saw government as the path to these goals. He and ...
A 1967 proposal to build a seven-story, 168-unit condominium on a 480-by-100-foot concrete platform to be constructed above the waters of Lake Union at the foot of East Roanoke Street in Seattle's Eas...
Dr. Carl Schlicke, M.D., wrote this article about Spokane surgeon Dr. William Witten Robinson, M.D. (1897-1957), whose career and practice were almost destroyed in 1929 when he testified against anoth...
The Treaty of Medicine Creek was made on December 26, 1854, at Medicine Creek in present-day Thurston County between the United States and members of the Puyallup, Nisqually, Steilacoom, and Squaxin I...
Viretta Park is located in the Denny Blaine neighborhood in Seattle and has elicited more attention, both locally and internationally, than its tiny size should warrant. The 1.8-acre site is on a stee...
The Central Washington communities of Wenatchee, in Chelan County, and East Wenatchee, across the Columbia River in Douglas County, got world attention in 1994 and 1995, when they found themselves in ...
Along with every other major West Coast port, Seattle's harbor was paralyzed from May 9 to July 31, 1934, by one of the most important and bitter labor strikes of the twentieth century. The struggle p...
On February 1, 1996, a jury in Whatcom County Superior Court finds two defendants -- Bellingham newsstand owner Ira Stohl and store manager Kristina Hjelsand -- not guilty of obscenity charges. Stohl ...
The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941, set in motion a series of events and decisions that led to what has been called the worst violation of constitutional rights in American histo...
The Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held in Seattle from November 30 to December 3, 1999, brought together trade ministers and other officials from the WTO's 135 me...
When Seattle elected officials and civic leaders won the bid to host the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), they hoped to link Seattle's name to a new round of negotia...