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Foothills Park is a 1,400-acre public green space located in the city of Palo Alto. For decades, the city has kept the park exclusive to Palo Alto residents under an ordinance that threatens non-residents who enter the park with jail time and a hefty fine unless they enter as guests of a city resident. This ordinance is a vestige of Palo Alto's history of racial discrimination. The ACLU Foundation... Read More

Few people have had such a dramatic and lasting effect on a particular area of law as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who directed the work of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project from its founding in 1972 until her appointment to the federal bench in 1980. Read More

My wife and I have made music together for the past 8 years, in an independent band named Unsung Lilly. We are passionate about creating epic, empowering pop music. As a same-sex couple, we have been heartened recently by the improved representation of LGBTQ people on television, and we are grateful that most people we meet are accepting of our relationship. It’s enough to make you think that m... Read More

Today, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California is calling for Facebook to take responsibility and address disparities in the treatment of content by LGBTQ creators on its platform. Earlier this summer, Facebook repeatedly rejected a video advertisement for Unsung Lilly, Sera and Frankie Golding-Young’s band, which featured an image of the two women with their foreheads touching. Facebook called... Read More

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a trailblazing social justice warrior who made it her life’s work to tear down gender-biased laws. The ACLU of Northern California shares some of our staff’s reflections on her legacy. Read More

Esta guía especial de Conozca sus derechos se dirige a las personas de color, afroamericanas y latinas. ¿Por qué es necesaria? Porque con frecuencia estas personas tienen una experiencia con la policía muy distinta a la de las personas blancas. Las personas de color resultan detenidas con mayor frecuencia por razón del color de su piel, a pesar de ser ilegal el uso de perfiles raciales. Tienen tam... Read More

This is a special Know Your Rights Guide for Black and Brown people. Why is it necessary? Because they often have a very different experience with the police than white people do. Black and Brown people get stopped more because of their skin color even though racial profiling is illegal. They are also more likely to be detained, handcuffed, searched, and have police point guns at them. These encou... Read More

The ACLU of Northern California is neutral on Prop. 25, which asks voters to uphold or repeal Senate Bill 10. SB 10 is deeply flawed. Although it would eliminate the predatory commercial bail industry, it would replace it with a risk assessment-based system that perpetuates racial disparities in pretrial detention, and it would grant judges and pretrial service agencies wide discretion to detain b... Read More

To this day, I have not been able to watch the whole video of George Floyd’s execution by police on a Minneapolis street. Nor can I bring myself to view the countless other recordings of Black and brown people who have been unlawfully killed by those sworn to protect and serve the public. I start having flashbacks about my own traumatic police encounter that happened when I was 16 — a still vivid ... Read More

In late May and early June 2020 during mass demonstrations following George Floyd's murder, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), in defiance of a 2019 city ordinance backed by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations, illegally tapped into a sprawling private camera network to conduct live mass surveillance of protesters. SFPD did so without first going through a legally... Read More