Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

After learning that the Scott County Detention Center in Mississippi has held people for as long as a year without indicting them or appointing counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed a class action suit against the county’s sheriff, district attorney, and judges. The county’s practices violate the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments’ rights to counsel, to a speedy trial, and to a fair bail hearing.

Whether a state may exclude houses of worship from a cash grant program in order to avoid any taxpayer subsidy for religion.

The ACLU and its Oregon affiliate are challenging the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's claim that it can access Oregonians' private prescription records without a warrant. The ACLU and the ACLU of Oregon represent a group of Oregon patients and a physician who are concerned about the impact on medical privacy and the doctor-patient relationship if federal law enforcement were permitted to access prescription records without demonstrating probable cause to a neutral judge. A district court judge ruled in February 2014 that patients have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their prescription records and that law enforcement must obtain a warrant in order to search such information. In June 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s ruling on procedural grounds but recognized that medical records are private and sensitive and require strong legal safeguards, leaving the door open to future challenges.

In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that the federal Communications Decency Act (CDA) is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. The landmark ruling affirmed the dangers of censoring what one judge called "the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed."