Civil rights case docket
Summaries of our current and historical civil rights cases.
A rich history of litigating important civil rights cases.
Our cases have smashed remnants of Jim Crow segregation; fought against voter suppression; destroyed some of the nation’s most notorious white supremacist groups; and upheld the rights of minorities, children, women, people with disabilities, and others who faced discrimination and exploitation. Many of our cases have changed institutional practices, stopped government or corporate abuses, and set precedents that helped thousands.
Currently, our litigation is focused on several major areas: voting rights, children’s rights, economic justice, immigrant justice, LGBTQ rights, and mass incarceration.
We have also filed amicus “friend-of-the-court” briefs to support litigation from other organizations that are doing similar work.
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
LWVFL, FL NAACP v. DeSantis, Boyd
In October, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed emergency litigation to reopen the voter registration period in Florida after Governor Ron DeSantis failed to extend an Oct. 7 deadline that fell between two major emergency disaster events, hurricanes Helene and Milton. These disasters caused the closure of government offices, roads, the postal service and loss of…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
Heimel v. Gregg, et. al
In October 2024, a plaintiff asked Georgia’s Superior Court of Oconee County to stop the county board of elections and registration from registering new voters until it held hearings on approximately 230 voters whose registrations had been challenged in July as part of a large-scale effort to restrict voter access. Shortly thereafter, with about a…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
Quinn v. Raffensperger
In this 2024 case, two residents of Gwinnett County, the state’s second most populous county and part of the Atlanta metro area, brought a federal lawsuit to force a statewide purge of thousands of voters and asked for emergency relief ahead of the 2024 general election. In October 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
Nancy Tray, et al. v. Florida State Board of Education, et al.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and its partners filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents of public school students facing discrimination under a state law that fails to provide them with a process for appealing decisions banning books from school libraries despite providing an appeals process for parents seeking such bans. This unequal law was…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, et al. v. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, et al.
In March 2024, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed SB 1, a sweeping new voter suppression law that targets, restricts and severely punishes civic engagement efforts to encourage voting and enable access to the ballot box. The following month, a coalition of civil rights, voting rights and disability rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking to…
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- Eliminating Poverty and Economic Inequality
Johnson v. Grants Pass
With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to deliver the most significant ruling in 40 years on the rights of people experiencing homelessness, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed an amicus brief defending their rights. The amicus brief was filed in Johnson v. Grants Pass, which alleges that a public sleeping/camping law used against people experiencing…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
Rinderle, et al., v. Cobb County School District, et al.
Katie Rinderle, a fifth-grade gifted specialist in the Cobb County School District in Georgia, was fired from her teaching job in 2023 for reading to her class My Shadow is Purple, an age-appropriate picture book about self-acceptance and navigating gender stereotypes. In response, Rinderle and other educators are suing the Cobb County School District for…
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- Dismantling White Supremacy
- LGBTQ Rights
Wood, et al. v. Florida Department of Education, et al.
After a Florida law blocked transgender and nonbinary teachers from using the pronouns and titles that best express themselves, the Southern Poverty Law Center and its partners filed a lawsuit on behalf of three teachers challenging the anti-LGBTQ+ statute. The lawsuit describes how the ban, also known as Subsection 3, unlawfully discriminates on the basis…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
Caicedo, et al. v. DeSantis
On Aug. 9, 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, suspended Monique Worrell, a Democrat, from her elected position as state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties because of his opposition to her criminal legal reforms and a general hostility toward elected Democrats. Worrell’s reforms included measures supported by her constituents, such as curtailing the…
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- Strengthening Democracy & Voting Rights
NAACP, Vermilion Parish Chapter v. City of Abbeville
After the Abbeville City Council in Louisiana chose to use a district map that denies equal representation to voters, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Vermilion Parish NAACP to block use of the map. The federal lawsuit describes how the council-approved redistricting map denies equal representation to voters, in…