Blog

For more than a decade, the ACLU of Northern California has been working to ensure that sex education in public schools is science-based, free of bias, medically accurate and age-appropriate. The law we co-sponsored with Planned Parenthood in 2004 has become a model for other states and for the national REAL (Responsible Education About Life) Act. After years of Bush Administration support for ine... Read More

In the span of four years, California voters three times rejected a ballot initiative that would require doctors to notify a pregnant teen's parent before an abortion. Propositions 73, Proposition 85 and Proposition 4 all proposed to amend the state Constitution to reverse the state Supreme Court ruling in an ACLU lawsuit that teenagers have fundamental rights to decide whether to end an unintende... Read More

Until December 2008, California required that women reside here for six months before they were eligible to receive essential health services through the state's Access for Infants and Mothers program. The ACLU of Northern California joined with other public interest organizations to challenge the rule on behalf of Maternal and Child Health Access, a non-profit organization.The San Francisco Super... Read More

Last week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said it would rehear the ACLU of Northern California's lawsuit challenging a California law that mandates that DNA is collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony. This suit is the only civil suit in the country challenging a disturbing trend toward invasive DNA collection of people who haven't been convicted of crime. The federal class-ac... Read More

Today, the ACLU of Northern California went to court in two separate cases with the same goal: shedding light on the government's use of controversial and arguably unconstitutional surveillance techniques. In the first, we filed a motion to unsealsecret court papers authorizing the government to use a device called a "stingray" to track an individual's location. In the second, we filed a... Read More

The ACLU-NC filed suit against the City of Milpitas today over its overly-restrictive and vague sign ordinance that is curtailing free speech in the city.Milpitas resident Rob Means put up a 26" x 16" lawn sign in his front yard that said "We are the 99%" to make a statement about economic inequality and to show support for the Occupy movement. Not long after that, the city sent him an abatement n... Read More

As state legislators accept deep cuts to education and the safety net, the ACLU is challenging Californians to acquire a real-time sense of how the state's bottom line would fare if prisons and jails were placed at the center of the chopping block.

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On Wednesday, July 18th the ACLU and community members gathered to support Juana Reyes, who is facing deportation after an arrest for selling tamales outside of the Florin Rd. Walmart in Sacramento and to urge the passage of the TRUST Act.Juana Reyes is your neighbor, your friend, or your family member. The food vendor and mother of two was recently arrested, chained and held in immigration detent... Read More

Why is the FBI spying on Occupy protesters? The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is determined to find out. Read More

Mayor Ed Lee shocked the city when he suggested bringing New York's failed stop-and-frisk policy to San Francisco. The ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Mayor Lee yesterday explaining why it's such a bad policy.We're not sure what Mayor Lee was thinking, but stop-and-frisk is a bad idea all around. Not only is it a civil liberties nightmare and toxic for police-community relations, it r... Read More

This morning's New York Times features a front-page story about an "uptick" in demands for information from cell carriers by law enforcement. As the ACLU's Chris Calabrese writes, the numbers are staggering: 1.3 million requests for information, possibly many times that many users affected, hundreds of full-time employees whose sole job is to process incoming demands, and reports that these demand... Read More

This month, California quietly shed an unwanted title, going from the largest prison system in the country to the second-largest after the state of Texas.The change comes amid a significant drop in the number of prisoners held in state facilities nine months into California's realignment plan, which aims to transfer low-level inmates to county jails and rehabilitation programs. The state's prison ... Read More