News & Commentary

Is the push to make America’s workplaces more hospitable to parents and pregnant workers the last bipartisan issue? Listening to the rhetoric issued in speeches at the Republican National Convention and from what we’ve heard so far at its Democratic counterpart, one might think so. The

For the first-time ever, the platform of a major political party includes an explicit call to repeal the Hyde Amendment, a federal law that has denied eligible poor and low-income women coverage for abortion care for nearly four decades.  This has anti-abortion democrats saying they have been betrayed. Make no mistake: the real betrayal came, 40 years ago when politicians hijacked the Medicaid bill – a law designed to

This blog post originally appeared at the ACLU of Texas.  The doctor-patient relationship is the cornerstone of medical practice, and the foundation of that relationship is trust.

This piece originally appeared at the

This piece originally appeared at The Guardian. Something is missing from the debate over police reform. Though police killings of Black men have sparked a nation

This piece was originally published in The Hill. Where are you going? Why are you going there? When did you purchase you

I spent last week in Guantánamo Bay, where I was supposed to be observing four days of pre-trial hearings in the military commission prosecution of the 9/11 defendants. But as is so often the case, on three of those days, the hearings were closed. On the single day of open hearings, the proceeding focused on the government’s destruction of key evidence in the case. This past weekend, defense lawyers confirmed that the evidence concerns a secret CIA black site abroad where the defendants and others were severely tortured. Almost 15 years have passed since the attacks of 9/11, and yet the Guantánamo military commissions are still muddling thr

Today, the Alaska Supreme Court found unconstitutional a law requiring physicians to notify a parent, guardian, or custodian of a minor seeking an abortion.  In its decision, the court found the law unjustifiably burdens only minors seeking an abortion – violating the equal protection guarantees of the Alaska Constitution.  The decision comes less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic

We’re excited to tap David Cole, a leading constitutional law expert and litigator, to become our National Legal Director, leading our Supreme Court practice and overseeing the work of the organization’s nearly 300 lawyers. The ACLU has participated in nearly every landmark case involving political expression, freedom of the press, speech on the internet, and separation of church and state in the U.S. Supreme Court during the last 96 years. Cole will replace Steven R. Shapiro, who has served as National Legal Director for a quarter century.In his role as National Legal Director, Cole will direct a program that includes approximately 1,400 state and federal lawsuits on a broad range of civil liberties issues. He will directly manage 100 ACLU staff attorneys in New York headquarters, oversee the organization’s U.S. Supreme Court docket, and provide leadership to more than 200 staff attorneys who work in ACLU affiliate offices in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. Another 1,700 volunteer cooperating attorneys throughout the country are engaged in ACLU litigation. With an annual headquarters budget of $140 million, and 1.3 million supporters, the ACLU is the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization.Cole is currently the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice.Cole has litigated many constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flag burning; National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding; and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged the constitutionality of making it a crime to advocate for peace and human rights under the statute prohibiting “material support” to terrorist groups. Cole’s victories include: successfully defending for over 21 years a group of Palestinian immigrants who