This case asks whether Kentucky’s legislature can legally favor some unions by giving them preferential treatment and disfavor others. A recent law does just that: SB 7 prohibits public employers from allowing their employees to use payroll deductions for union dues yet expressly exempts law enforcement and fire protection unions from this prohibition. Two state circuit courts and the Court of Appeals have held that this law violates the Kentucky Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. The State now appeals to the Kentucky Supreme Court. The Court’s decision has important implications for equal protection, free speech, and labor rights in Kentucky.

At the core of this case is the question of whether the government can extract and test our DNA without a warrant. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, together with the ACLU of Michigan, filed an amicus brief arguing that, since our DNA contains vast amounts of highly sensitive information about us, DNA testing and extraction constitute a search and therefore require a warrant under both the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, section 11 of the Michigan Constitution. If there were no warrant requirement, as the State urges, police would be able to arrest someone for one offense, even pretextually, and limitlessly test their DNA to investigate unrelated crimes. This would especially impact people from marginalized populations who are most likely to be subject to these police practices.

For more than two decades, criminal defendants in Massachusetts have experienced a recurring counsel crisis, with defendants periodically going unrepresented due to low attorney compensation rates. Despite many opportunities, the Legislature has failed to raise rates high enough to remedy the constitutional violation. At present, the compensation rate for district court cases is $75 per hour. Consequently, in a case brought by the Committee for Public Counsel Services—the Massachusetts public defender agency—the ACLU of Massachusetts and the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative filed an amicus brief urging the Court to hold that the statute setting attorney compensation rates is unconstitutional. This case has important implications for the right to counsel and access to justice in Massachusetts.

This case presents the question whether a person can be convicted of disorderly conduct for speech that the state deems “obscene” but that does not actually qualify as unprotected obscenity under the First Amendment. The outcome of this case could have serious implications for free speech and the rights of criminal defendants in Pennsylvania, where law enforcement frequently misuses the disorderly conduct statute to punish constitutionally protected speech.