A newly enacted Montana law, HB 121, bars transgender and intersex people from using restrooms and other sex-separated facilities that correspond to their gender identity in public spaces. In doing so, HB 121 seeks to undermine transgender and intersex people’s personhood and ability to participate in public life. Together with the ACLU of Montana and Legal Voice, the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative filed this lawsuit on behalf of a group of transgender and intersex Montanans challenging HB 121 as violating numerous provisions of the Montana Constitution.

This case arises from the November 2024 election for state supreme court justice in North Carolina. Incumbent State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs defeated Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, but Griffin has filed a petition seeking to invalidate more than 65,000 votes from the election. He argues that the state Board of Elections impermissibly allowed 60,000 people to register without providing their driver’s licenses or social security numbers, and that the Board impermissibly allowed 5,500 overseas voters to cast absentee ballots without photo identification. The petition has resulted in both federal and state litigation, and the ACLU has submitted amicus briefs in both venues. In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project and the ACLU of North Carolina filed an amicus brief explaining that the petition’s attempt to cancel tens of thousands of votes threatens democratic backsliding in North Carolina. Separately, in the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and the ACLU of North Carolina submitted an amicus brief explaining that, even if the Board did make mistakes, cancelling votes as a consequence of those mistakes would violate the popular sovereignty provision of the North Carolina Constitution because voters relied on the Board to know how to register and vote.

This case in the New York Court of Appeals (the highest New York state court) asks whether a government agency can conceal guidance that it issues to judges on how to apply the law in adjudicating cases. A few years ago, news reporting brought to light that a New York administrative agency has a practice of issuing such guidance to state court judges without disclosing it to the public. Because the agency's guidance informs how judges decide cases—with important implications for people’s rights—the New York Civil Liberties Union requested access to it under New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The agency denied the request, so the NYCLU sued. The NYCLU and the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative are arguing that the public is entitled to the guidance and that there is a strong public interest in the transparent administration of justice.

This case asks whether the state can arrest, charge, and convict someone under Montana’s obstruction statute for exercising their federal and state constitutional right to record police officers in public spaces. The defendant was filming a traffic stop when police instructed him to move farther away. When he did not move as far as they wanted, they arrested him for obstructing a peace officer. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ACLU of Montana, filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant arguing that the officer’s refusal to allow the defendant to peacefully record police activity from a public sidewalk was, in effect, a content-based restriction on speech that could not be justified under strict scrutiny. Even if the restriction was not content-based, our brief argues that it is not a reasonable time place or manner restriction.

This case asks whether Georgia’s insanity defense statutes can be construed to contain an exception for cases where defendants allegedly triggered their own insanity by discontinuing their medication weeks before the alleged crimes. The State argues for such an exception, even though the text of the insanity defense statutes expressly pins the availability of the defenses to the defendant’s mental condition “at the time of” the alleged crimes. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ACLU of Georgia, filed an amicus brief arguing that even if the State’s interpretation of the statutory text were reasonable, its argument should still be rejected because it contradicts the rule of lenity. The rule of lenity is a well-established canon of statutory construction requiring that, if a criminal statute can reasonably be interpreted in different ways, courts must adopt the interpretation most favorable to the accused.

This case asks if ORS 138.105(8)(a)(A)—which removes an appellate court’s authority to review a “sentence that is within the presumptive sentence prescribed by the rules of the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission”—precludes appellate review of a state constitutional challenge to a within-guidelines criminal sentence. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Oregon, filed an amicus brief in support of defendant Fernandez, who seeks to challenge his sentence under the Oregon Constitution’s proportionality guarantee. The amicus brief argues that interpreting the statute to preclude review of Fernandez’s challenge would raise grave constitutional concerns under Oregon’s separation of powers and privileges and immunities doctrines.

Article I, section 9 of the Utah Constitution protects incarcerated individuals from both cruel and unusual punishment and unnecessarily rigorous treatment. This case asks whether death-sentenced plaintiffs seeking to challenge certain execution methods as cruel and unusual or unnecessarily rigorous under this provision must identify, in their pleadings, an alternative method of execution. The U.S. Supreme Court has required this alternative for Eighth Amendment challenges, but the ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the Capital Punishment Project and ACLU of Utah, filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, arguing that federal caselaw does not limit the greater protections provided by section 9 of the Utah Constitution. Forcing prisoners challenging a method of execution to identify an acceptable alternative method is cruel, coercive, and not necessary to the administration of Utah’s death penalty laws.

This case in the North Carolina Supreme Court involves the question of whether the police violated the U.S. Constitution when they searched the defendant, Mr. Wright’s, backpack even after he repeatedly said no to the search requests. The ACLU alongside the ACLU of North Carolina filed an amicus brief arguing that the search was unconstitutional because Mr. Wright’s eventual “consent” was the result of police coercion. Our brief urges the court to consider the totality of the circumstances that make one more susceptible to coercion, including race and poverty.

Five transgender Kansans are challenging an effort by Kansas Attorney General Kobach to require the state to issue driver’s licenses with a gender marker that reveals their sex assigned at birth. The Attorney General is asking a state court to apply a new state law that defines “sex” to functionally erase the existence of transgender people under the law.

For state constitutional rights to be meaningful, they have to be enforceable by courts. This case will affect whether people can sue government officials in state court to stop the violation of their constitutional rights.

This case in the Minnesota Supreme Court asks whether the MFFIA's protections apply to newsgatherers even if they are alleged to have engaged in trespassing while newsgathering. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, alongside the ACLU of Minnesota and law firm Biersdorf & Associations, filed a brief representing Unicorn Riot, a media organization that covered protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The brief argues that MFFIA and constitutional reporter’s privileges, under both the U.S. and Minnesota constitutions, protect Unicorn Riot from having to comply with Energy Transfer’s subpoenas.