Legal Docket

On September 14, 2009 ACLU Foundation of Northern California and civil rights allies filed a motion to intervene in Associated General Contractors of America v. California Department of Transportation.  The lawsuit, currently pending in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, was brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation and seeks to dismantle Caltrans' Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) p... Read More

A settlement was finalized September 16 between the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in its case involving Kebin Reyes, a U.S. citizen who was six years old when he was illegally detained for ten hours by immigration officials. We argued that Kebin's constitutional rights were violated when he was taken from his home in San Rafael... Read More

The California corrections department is using underground, non-public guidelines, rather than lawful regulations, to decide whether to transfer California prisoners to other states as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee. This means that inmates and their families do not know how the prisons decide whom to transfer. It also leaves open the possibility that prison officials are using arbitrary an... Read More

Federal class action lawsuit filed in 2008 charging that the city of Antioch and its police department are engaged in a concerted campaign of intimidation, harassment, and discrimination against African-Americans who receive federal housing assistance. Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California reached a settlement with a Lake County school district that contains a series of steps the district will undertake to protect students from anti-gay harassment and discrimination. The agreement is on behalf of a student who was persistently subjected to verbal taunting and physical abuse based on his sexual orientation.The ACLU Foundation of No... Read More

On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for the state to ban same-sex couples from civil marriage. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and co-counsel represent a group of committed lesbian and gay couples as well as two non-profit organizations, Equality California and Our Family Coalition. Our co-counsel are the National Center for Lesbian Rights, La... Read More

Does a school district have the authority to expel students based on an incident involving a school resource officer that occurred off campus and after school? A Contra Costa County Superior Court ruled in May 2008 that the Antioch Unified School District violated the rights of two students when it expelled them from school following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed ... Read More

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a National Security Letter (NSL) on the Internet Archive, a digital library. The letter sought personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. The NSL also included a gag order, prohibiting the Archive and its counsel from revealing th... Read More

In response to a March 3, 2007, letter from the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Linden Unified School District has agreed not to read private text messages stored on students’ cell phones unless there is good reason to believe that the search will provide evidence that the student was violating the law or breaking a school rule. The district’s new policy also limits the scope of the ... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California has serious concerns about the city's decision to change the route of the Olympic torch relay in an apparent attempt to avoid protestors. On April 10, the day after relay, we filed a request under the Sunshine Ordinance for records on the city's relay route planning and crowd control policies.Leading up to the torch relay, we worked to guarantee that... Read More

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