Archive

The New Haven Unified School District and the City of Union City have each reached groundbreaking settlements with students in Union City as a result of a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California on behalf of three high school students whose civil rights were violated. On February 22, 2002 the three were rounded up along with a group of mostly Latino and Asian students... Read More

On May 17, 2000, the ACLU Foundations of California, along with other civil rights organizations, filed a lawsuit against the State of California because of the terrible conditions in many of its public schools. We argued that the State is failing to provide thousands of public school students, particularly those in low income communities and communities of color, with the basic necessities req... Read More

For nearly 25 years, the California Department of Corrections (CDC) held an unwritten policy of segregating prisoners by race for, upon entry to a new facility. However, in February, 2005 the Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision, declared this policy was not up to constitutional standards. The CDC implemented this policy in order to curb interracial violence. Upon entry to a new facility each... Read More

Should a criminal defendant have the burden of proving that a prosecutor's peremptory challenges to all of the Native American jurors in the jury pool were "predominantly" based on race or is it enough to show that one of the reasons for the challenges was based on racial stereotypes? Read More

This case challenged the threatened violation of the voting rights of thousands of California citizens, arising from the use of obsolete, unreliable, and discredited pre-scored punch card voting equipment in the election scheduled to take place on October 7, 2003 regarding the gubernatorial recall and the vote on Proposition 53 (Legislative Constitutional Amendment that would dedicate part of the ... Read More

Filed in 1999 on behalf of African-American, Latino, and Pilipino American applicants to UC Berkeley, Castaneda v. Regents of the University of California alleged that the university's admission procedures unfairly disadvantaged applicants of color in violation of their federal civil rights by not taking into account the full range of indicators of "merit." The parties were able to settle the case... Read More

The recent indictments of high-ranking officers in the San Francisco Police Department have brought into the spotlight both the Department as a whole and the mechanisms that exist for holding police accountable for misconduct. The media, elected officials, and members of the public have not only focused on the merits of the charges against the individual officers involved, but have begun to exa... Read More

Racial profiling by law enforcement has long plagued communities of color. The 2003 settlement in our racial profiling case established a moratorium on California Highway Patrol consent searches.

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Racial profiling by law enforcement has long plagued communities of color, yet until recently was virtually ignored by the media, courts, and public officials. In the last few years, the issue seized the attention of the public as never before, due in no small part to the data first released in New Jersey and Maryland showing extreme racial profiling problems within the state police departments... Read More

The cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001, shuddered across America like an earthquake, shocking our basic assumptions, jarring our complacency and rattling our view of the world. But if the attacks on New York and Washington DC were an earthquake, they carried with them a powerful aftershock – a backlash that continues to penetrate the lives of American citizens and immigrants across the nation. Read More