Topic: Law
Like all sizeable American cities, Seattle since its earliest days has attracted its share of prostitution, gambling, illegal drug and liquor sales, and a variety of other behaviors and activities tha...
Marilyn Ward (1929-2012), a volunteer lobbyist for a wide range of liberal social issues in the 1960s and 1970s, was an early member of the Citizens' Abortion Study Group, later renamed Washington Cit...
Lee Minto (b. 1927), executive director of Planned Parenthood of Seattle-King County from 1967 until her retirement in 1993, played a key role in the campaign for Referendum 20, which legalized aborti...
Founded in New York in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) soon reached into every state in the nation. Its first recorded case in Washington came in 1925, when ACLU members interceded on ...
Chinese immigrants, largely men, began arriving in Seattle in the 1860s, and played a key role in the development of Washington Territory, providing labor for the region's mines and salmon canneries a...
John Arum was an environmental attorney and outdoorsman who gained prominence in his adopted state of Washington as an advocate for wilderness preservation and Native American tribal rights. He worked...
On November 8, 1966, Washington state voters adopted Initiative 229, repealing the so-called "Blue Law," which had been enacted in 1909. This action legalized the operations of thousands of businesses...
Bob’s Chile Parlor was a gambling den in downtown Seattle in the 1950s and 1960s, an era when city officials gave tacit approval to illegal vice and police extorted payoffs from club owners and ...
Though important legal cases are not usually known by the name of the judge who decides them, this one is. "The Boldt Decision," as it is commonly referred to, was one of the biggest court decisions i...
Homer T. Bone, a Democratic senator representing Washington in the United States Congress (1932-1944) and later a Judge in the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (1944-1956), has been dubbed...
In the summer of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed George Floyd Jr., a Black civilian, during an arrest attempt. Captured on vi...
Care for the indigent poor, infirm, disabled, and mentally ill has been a controversial subject in Washington since long before statehood was achieved in 1889. Prior to 1854, most mentally ill pe...
The first Washington state elected official to make national history in a crusade against cigarettes was not Attorney General Christine Gregoire, who brokered a settlement between the tobacco industry...
Establishing a water system for the residents of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island was a topic of discussion as soon as the town was incorporated in 1909, but it took five years to complete a system. S...
Gordon C. Culp came out of Auburn, Washington, during the Great Depression, and never forgot his roots or his old friends. He went on to become a counsel to United States Senator Henry M. Jackson (191...
Daylight saving in Washington has a long and contentious history, shaped by conflict between urban and rural interests. Its history is marked by many local referendums and three hotly debated, statewi...
Nearly 50 years have passed since U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt handed down his historic ruling affirming Native American fishing rights. In this originl essay written for National History Da...
William O. Douglas, who grew up in Yakima, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court at the age of 40 and served for more than 36 years, longer than any other justice in the Court's history. Bo...
Dr. Samuel Goldenberg (1921-2011), a Seattle psychologist, organized the Citizens' Abortion Study Group after being unable to help two of his patients obtain legal abortions in 1967. The group, later ...
William Lee Dwyer was born in Tacoma, the only child of Charles and Ila Dwyer. His parents divorced when he was 5 years old and he and his mother moved to Seattle, where she worked as a stenographer t...
Steven Farmer, a Seattle airline steward often praised for his leading-man good looks, found himself unwittingly cast as villain and victim in a real-life legal, moral, and medical drama in 1988, when...
Judge Betty Binns Fletcher was appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) in 1979 and carried a full caseload there for 33 years, working to within days of her...
One of the first women to practice law in Seattle and the first to represent the 44th District in the state senate, Lady Willie Forbus was a liberal Democrat, nicknamed the Steel Magnolia for her tena...
Gary David Gayton, a prominent Seattle lawyer and businessman, was the fourth child of John J. (Jacob) Gayton (1899-1969) and Virginia Clark Gayton (1902-1993), and the grandson of Seattle pioneers Jo...