New Books for the New Year: Find Your Next Legal Read

The new year is not just for resolutions. In the law library it’s also a time to add new titles to the collection. Here is a roundup of what we have added to our catalog so far in 2023. These titles are available to check out at our temporary location in Tumwater. You can also request them through interlibrary loan at your home library. Contact the reference desk at Library.Requests@courts.wa.gov or 360–357–2136 with questions, or place a hold in our online catalog using your library account. And don’t forget about our new eBooks collection.

Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court by Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson. Shortlisted is the 2022 winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Women’s Nonfiction. Using empirical research, the book tells the stories of women whose names were brought forth as potential candidates for open seats on the US Supreme Court. Famous legal scholar and author Edward Chemerinsky said that “Shortlisted is beautifully written and an important addition to the literature about the Supreme Court, the process of nominating justices, and the role of gender in American law.”

Drone Law (2022–2 ed.) by Zaida Angulo McGhee and Tyler Hazen. If you were gifted a drone during the holidays, you might be wondering where you are allowed to fly it or what happens if it crashes into something. If so, you will want to check out this new title. Drone Law not only covers FAA regulations and federal statutes. It also covers topics such as tort law, criminal liability, constitutional issues, state and local laws, and more.

Broken Scales: Race and the Crisis of Justice in a Divided America by Tom Diaz. In this non-fiction title published in 2021, Diaz “proposes that the everyday actions of ordinary people, in the context of extreme political and cultural polarization, distort the criminal justice system and betray the lofty ideals expressed in American founding documents and centuries of Anglo-American articulations of basic human rights.”

Her Honor: My Life on the Bench…What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It by Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell. Judge Cordell was the first African American to sit on the Superior Court bench in Santa Clara County and the first African American woman judge to serve in the Superior Courts of northern California. In this 2021 autobiography, Judge Cordell “takes you into her chambers where she haggles with prosecutors and defense attorneys and into the courtroom during jury selection and sentencing hearings. She uses real cases to highlight how judges make difficult decisions, all the while facing outside pressures from the media, law enforcement, lobbyists, and the friends and families of the people involved.”

Landmark Indian Law Cases (2nd ed.) edited by Joel West Williams. Released in 2022, this second edition includes some important changes from the first edition. According to the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), where Williams served as an attorney, “this edition adds five cases that were either decided or gained elevated significance in the twenty years since the last edition. Five cases whose prominence have waned are no longer included in this edition.” Westlaw headnotes are provided for each case. The book includes Washington cases, such as Washington v. Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association, 443 U.S. 658 (1979) and Washington v. Confederated Tribes of Colville Indian Reservation, 447 U.S. 134 (1980).

Mental Health and Conflicts: A Handbook for Empowerment by Dan Berstein. Conflict is difficult and can be even more so if it involves a mental health crisis. What can you do to be prepared? According to publisher The American Bar Association, “This book is designed to help laypeople as well as professional conflict resolvers, people living with mental health problems as well as people with no knowledge of mental health, and those dealing with conflicts that are specifically focused on mental health as well as those facing any other kind of conflict.”

Along with these titles, we recently added some new treatises and guides for legal practitioners and self-represented litigants to the collection:

· Washington Family Law Deskbook (3rd ed., 2022) by The Washington State Bar Association (read our blog recap here).

· Civil Litigation Management Manual (2022) by the Judicial Conference of the United States, Committee on Court Administration and Case Management.

· Cost-Effective Child Custody Litigation (2022) by Samuel E. Thomas and Kumudha N. Kumarachandran.

· Paralegal Ethics Handbook (2022) by State Bar of Texas, Paralegal Division.

· Represent Yourself in Court: Prepare & Try a Winning Civil Case (11th ed., 2022) by Paul Bergman.

· The Online Courtroom: Leveraging Remote Technology in Litigation (2022) by Richard K. Gabriel

Happy New (Book) Year from the law library! (LE)