In 1977, Marie Von Hoffburg, a female service member of the United States Army, was discharged due to her alleged sexual orientation. The Southern Poverty Law Center appealed the decision on her behalf alongside the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Originally filed in 1975, this class action lawsuit is aimed at improving the education provided to thousands of Mississippi schoolchildren with educational disabilities.
The ventilation system on Alabama's death row was broken, resulting in stifling, stagnant, medically dangerous heat in the prisoners' 55-square foot cells. The Center sued to allow inmates to purchase fans at their own expense. An anonymous donor provided free fans to all death row inmates.
The SPLC filed a federal class action lawsuit against Tennessee for Medicaid practices that deprived thousands of people of health care coverage despite eligibility. These policies resulted in some residents – including those with serious medical conditions – going needlessly without health care.
Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) fraudulently claimed to provide services that “convert” people from gay to straight. These services, known as conversion therapy, have been discredited or highly criticized by all major American medical, psychiatric, psychological and professional counseling organizations. The SPLC filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against JONAH for fraudulent business practices. A jury found that JONAH violated the state’s consumer fraud law by offering services that purport to turn gay people straight.
Although this constitutional challenge to horrific conditions at a juvenile center was filed by other lawyers in 1975, the Center and the Mississippi Center for Justice took over in 2003 to enforce a judgment that had been ignored for more than 25 years.
The Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry in North Carolina failed to provide female veterans with the same job training classes male veterans received through the organization’s federally funded programs. Instead, female veterans were offered classes such as knitting, art therapy, yoga, meditation, how to de-clutter your room, self-esteem and Bible study. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a sex discrimination complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor against the organization.
After learning that police in Fairfield, Alabama, may have been using a city ordinance to harass low-wage Latino day laborers, the SPLC and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network asked the police chief for public records to determine if Latinos were being targeted. When the police chief refused to respond, the SPLC and the day laborer group filed a lawsuit to compel him to release the records.
LVI used a subcontractor system to avoid paying workers the wages owed to them. One of the large subcontractors used by LVI, defendant D&L, Environmental, Inc., failed to pay many of its migrant workers anything for much of their labor.
Officials with Florida’s Collier County schools effectively barred immigrant children with limited English skills from enrolling in high school and pushed them into an adult English program that offered no opportunity to earn credit toward a high school diploma – a violation of state and federal...
