Admission to State Bar Ass.

Graham, how we "document this occasion" depends upon what kind of a record we have. In your case, what would that record be? Is it an actual document or tradition?

It's great to hear, GrahamJ, that you found the files. Examples for citing state-level supreme court files of various types are at EE 8.37–8.39.

Graham, that section of EE covers multiple types of state-level supreme/superior court records that are maintained at a state-level archives. You are right that none is a state-bar admission; but the specific nature of the record is not the critical issue. The significant elements are

• what media you are using (whether original records, typescripts, guides, microfilm images, digital provided online by the archives,* etc.) and
• (when we are using original documents) how an archives organizes its material.

In my response, I did not go into the latter because I assumed you had also read EE’s first record-based chapter (Chapter 3: Archives & Artifacts), which begins with a discussion of how archives organize their materials and the essential elements we need to capture in a citation. (EE 3.1). This is fundamental to every other type of record we use in any archives that follows archival standards  (state and federal government, university archives, etc.).  In the chapter that provides Supreme Court examples, the introductory discussion to the chapter—particularly 8.1 and 8.3—also reiterate those basics.

Essentially, for every original document in an archival collection, the elements we identify are

• the document itself by name of creator, ID of document, and date
• the file the document is in
• the collection the file is in
• the series the collection is in
• the record group the series is in—by RG number and name
• the exact name of the archives
• the location of the archives

And yes, an example for your exact need would have been wonderful. But the world of historical resources is so vast and so variant that no citation guide can cover every type of record that exists—not even if it were the size of the OED. The way we deal with all the variants is to ground ourselves in the basic principles, and then adapt as needed.

*Note: Given that the Washington State Archives has an online collection of Superior Court (not Supreme Court) records, if this is where you found your document, then there are other elements to cite.