Because of the social media circus surrounding the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial, it was easy to overlook one of the principal—yet least likely—actors in the courtroom drama: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ghostwrote and placed the 2018 Washington Post op-ed by Heard about surviving domestic abuse that was the basis of the […]
Boycotts aren’t protected speech, says federal court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit has upheld an Arkansas law saying public contractors can’t boycott Israel. The decision is a dangerous incursion on free speech. This isn’t a case where a private employer is making staff take a pro-Israel pledge—something that would be weird […]
In recent years, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has taken criticism for an increasingly partisan public persona at odds with its historical position as a nonpartisan champion of civil liberties. A damning new report suggests the organization was subsumed in culture war politics. After 2017’s violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the organization […]
South Carolina has the highest eviction rate in the country, and the state chapter of the NAACP wanted to find out why. Given the difficulty of tracking down every case by hand, the organization hoped to use a software program called a “scraper” to collect data from South Carolina’s online repository of legal filings. Researchers, […]
In the late 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) famously—and controversially—defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, which was home to many Holocaust survivors. It was a defining moment for the group and for the idea that free speech, no matter how vile, must be guaranteed to […]
Tempe police watched a man drown while refusing to offer assistance. “I’m not jumping in after you,” one of the officers says in a transcript of body-cam footage from the encounter, which took place at Tempe Town Lake around sunrise on Saturday, May 28. The man, Sean Bickings, repeatedly asked the officers for help. After […]
This week, David Cole, the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Legal Director, wrote in The Nation that critics have accused the organization of “no longer defend[ing] those with whom we disagree.” Former supporters have referred to the organization as a “caricature of its former self” that is “leaving the First Amendment behind.” Cole, on […]