Access to information is fundamental to achieving justice, especially in contexts where historical legal precedents intersect with contemporary issues. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the first “Boldt decision” issued in the long-running Washington State tribal fishing rights case United States v. Washington. This session we will describe the law library’s undertaking to digitize all of the print briefs in our collection associated with the many proceedings in this case brought before the Washington State Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court and make them publicly available and discoverable via our institutional repository. This work involved a collaboration with the main UW Libraries as well as inter-departmental work within the Gallagher Law Library.

Since the collection was officially made public in September 2023, it has seen over 1,400 document downloads from users in over 40 countries.