Legal Docket

Two Southern California fair housing organizations sued Roomate.com, an Internet-based roommate matching service, arguing that the website must be held responsible for postings on the site that violate federal fair housing laws. Roommate.com argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for content posted by third parties, gives it complete immu... Read More

The ACLU Foundations of California has sued telecommunications giants AT&T and Verizon to stop them from continuing to provide the National Security Agency (NSA) with the personal phone records of millions of California customers.Since September 11, 2001, the telephone companies have been providing the NSA with customers' records, including phone numbers for incoming and outgoing calls, and ti... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully defended the First Amendment when they persuaded a federal district court judge in San Francisco to dissolve an order requiring a domain registrar to shut down the domain name Wikileaks.org in a dispute over documents allegedly posted on the site by a former employee of Swiss Bank Julius Baer. Read More

In March 2007, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit in Napa Superior Court on behalf of five families, seeking judicial relief from an unconstitutionally vague, overbroad, and restrictive dress code enforced by Redwood Middle School and the Napa Valley USD. Read More

The District Attorney of Yolo County in late December 2004 sought a permanent injunction against the Broderick Boys “gang,” attempting to place on permanent probation, without any trial or due process, hundreds of residents of a predominantly Latino neighborhood in West Sacramento. In July 2005, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a motion to set aside the permanent injunction for lac... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, the Asian Law Caucus and the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a class action lawsuit challenging the United States Custom and Immigration Services' (USCIS) failure to process citizenship applications within a reasonable time period. The lawsuit is based on federal laws that require timely processing of imm... Read More

The issue raised in Barrett v. Rosenthal was whether the protection of the Communications Decency Act's Section 230 applies to individuals who frequently use the Internet to pass on information obtained elsewhere, whether by forwarding an email written by someone else or, as was the case in Barrett, posting an email from someone else to a newsgroup. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed... Read More

The Berkeley Police Association is seeking to shut down the open public hearing process that has made Berkeley's Police Review Commission (PRC) a model for the nation since its creation in 1973. In the wake of the recent Copley Press v. San Diego County decision (which severely limits public access to the disciplinary records of police officers), the police association is hoping to exclude the pu... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California has historically opposed civil gang injunctions because of their unfair impact on civil liberties, their potential for racial profiling, and due process concerns.In September 2006, the City Attorney of San Francisco sought the city's first civil gang injunction in the Bayview neighborhood.  On June 21, 2007, the city filed two new gang injunctio... Read More

In response to the City's first request for a civil injunction against an alleged gang in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed an amicus brief on October 17, 2006 asking the Court to deny the City Attorney's request for preliminary injunction at the scheduled October 30, 2006 hearing. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California asked the Court to c... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed League of Women Voters v. McPherson to restore the voting rights of over 145,000 Californians (mostly young men of color with non-violent felony convictions), who were recently disenfranchised by the Attorney General. The Attorney General's opinion challenged by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California states that individuals in jail as a conditi... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed an amicus brief arguing that the government violates the Sixth Amendment and attorney-client privilege when it records telephone calls between a pre-trial detainee and his lawyer and then provides the recordings to the prosecution team. Read More