Archive

The California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the State of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today for allowing school districts throughout the state to charge fees for books and other essential educational supplies. This practice violates the California Constitution which, since 1879, has guaranteed children a free education. Read More

Today Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC), and HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance (HALSA) sent a letter to David Maxwell-Jolly, Director of the California Department of Health Care Services, demanding a full explanation for the unauthorized and illegal disclosures of confidential identifying information of approximately 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal reci... Read More

A federal appeals court today dismissed a case against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc. for its role in the Bush administration's extraordinary rendition program. The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Northern California filed the lawsuit in May 2007 on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA, forcibly disappeared to U.S.-run prisons overseas and tortured. The Bush a... Read More

Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the W. Haywood Burns Institute released a report that explores how racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in access to education, employment, and housing impact the contact people will have with the criminal justice system. The report, "Balancing the Scales of Justice," found that these factors relate to how likely it is... Read More

On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track... Read More

A few weeks ago, we wrote about United States v. Maynard, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone's movements.Last Friday, Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York recognized that Maynard's reasoning also applies when the government tries to ret... Read More

Every year tens of thousands of people in California are arrested for simply possessing small amounts of marijuana. These arrests overload our already stressed courts and jails. They also divert scarce public safety dollars that could be used to address violent crime. California's Proposition 19, on the November 2, 2010 ballot, offers a remedy that will move marijuana policy in a direction that ma... Read More

Is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spying on Muslim communities in Berkeley, Fresno, Visalia, San Jose or other Northern California communities?We don't know. But we're determined to find out.Over the past several months, community members from cities across Northern California have contacted the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus to share their personal experiences about visits by FBI agents... Read More

Imagine you're a soldier stationed overseas and discover you're pregnant. If you want to have an abortion but are living in a country where it's illegal, you might as well be living in pre-Roe v. Wade America. Why? Current federal law prohibits almost all abortion services at U.S. military hospitals, even if a woman pays for the procedure herself. So, like a woman in the 1950s, you can fly to anot... 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