Legal Docket

The office of Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley has failed to disclose public documents on the costs of prosecuting capital cases, according to a lawsuit filed today by The American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of California (ACLU Foundations of California) on behalf of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ) at Harvard Law School. The lawsuit is for publ... Read More

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and The San Francisco Bay Guardian (The Guardian) filed a preliminary injunction motion on April 28, asking the court to order the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to disclose records regarding the worldwide scramble for execution drugs by state prison officials. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and ... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit in March 2006 raising a constitutional challenge to California's three-drug execution protocol. The lawsuit states that part of the three-drug regimen used to carry out executions in California acts as a chemical curtain. The drug conceals significant information, violating the First Amendment rights of the press and the public to be fully... Read More

On July 8, 2009, ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights — representing LGBT community organizations Our Family Coalition, Lavender Seniors of the East Bay, and PFLAG — filed a motion to intervene in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of ... Read More

On June 23, 2010, the National ACLU intervened in a lawsuit filed by Amazon.com against the North Carolina Department of Revenue (NCDOR) for its unreasonable demand for customer purchase information.In December 2009, as part of a tax audit, the NCDOR requested the records of Amazon.com customers in that state for purchases made between August 1, 2003, and February 28, 2010. Amazon compli... Read More

Should the police be able to follow you around and collect and analyze your DNA from something you discard, without a warrant or even a reason to believe you have committed a crime? 

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Can the State of California retroactively enforce Prop 83's residency restrictions against sex offenders who committed their offenses before the law went into effect? Read More

This case brings to light some of the ACLU Foundation of Northern California's concerns about a state law that makes it unlawful for a registered sex offender to live within 2,000 feet of a school or park. We argue that by applying the law to people who committed their crimes before the law went into effect, the state of California is advancing an overbroad interpretation that violates the state C... Read More

On November 23, 2009, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and civil rights allies filed an amicus brief in Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Plaintiffs argued that MTC, the planning body for all twenty-six independent transit operators in the Bay Area, consistently under-funded AC Transit, a bus line with high minority ridership, in comparison to other transit systems li... Read More

Should the California Supreme Court apply the federal forum doctrine or the "incompatible use" test to evaluate solicitation restrictions at the Los Angeles International Airport under the California Constitution's Liberty of Speech Clause? In 1997, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness ("ISKCON") filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, challen... Read More

On Nov. 5, 2008, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lambda Legal, filed a writ petition in the California Supreme Court challenging the validity of Proposition 8. Proposition 8, passed by a narrow majority of California voters in the November 2008 election, purports to amend California's Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex ... Read More

In August 2007, the AFL-CIO and other groups filed suit to stop government officials from implementing a Department of Homeland Security regulation that created widespread concern about anti-immigrant discrimination in employment and unnecessary and unjust terminations. Read More