The PCJF filed a civil rights claim in October 2023 against the City and County of San Francisco, challenging the illegal and unconstitutional arrest and detention of 113 young people. The PCJF is currently preparing to file a federal civil rights class action lawsuit against San Francisco and police commanders.
Throughout 2020, the D.C. MPD conducted a widespread and forceful assault on protestors taking to the street of the District to rally against racist police violence. The PCJF seeks to end the MPD’s unconstitutional and punitive tactics of indiscriminately deploying less lethal weapons into crowds of persons engaged in First Amendment protected activities.
MPD officers used a false arrest as a thin excuse to storm BLM Plaza while creating widespread disarray and disruption of peaceful First Amendment activities.
Brave water protectors put their bodies on the line tirelessly and peacefully protesting the construction of the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota, in opposition to the destruction of Indigenous land, resources, and the environment. The CPLL supported water protectors as they faced trumped up criminal charges for lawfully opposing the destruction of their land. This intense fight resulted in important victories and the dismissal of outrageous felony theft charges leveled against water protectors.
The Center for Protest Law & Litigation, working with our partners at Earthrights International, won a major victory on behalf of Line 3 Indigenous-led water protectors, obtaining a court ruling that a MN Sheriff’s blockade of their camp was illegal and which barred any ongoing efforts to obstruct access.
The PCJF and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) represented journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin in the case of Martin v. Wrigley, a federal free speech lawsuit challenging Georgia’s anti-BDS law as unconstitutional. Martin's lawsuit helped lead to changes to the law in 2022.
Dundon v. Kirchmeier is a federal class action lawsuit filed with nine named plaintiffs on behalf of hundreds of water protectors who were attacked by law enforcement while demonstrating against a pipeline being built under the Missouri River in North Dakota.
In 2018, at the same time the Trump administration and other proponents of bigotry, repression, and environmental devastation ratcheted up their verbal attacks against a protest against them, they took concrete actions to shut down free speech actions in Washington, D.C. In rapid-response, PCJF then led a national organizing, education, and outreach campaign bringing together organizations and grassroots groups across the country, that resulted in more than 140,000 comments to the formal record.
The PCJF waged a decade long battle to strike down the District of Columbia’s unconstitutional regulations on postering winning a string of victories in the lower court which forced the District to repeatedly rewrite its unlawful regulations. The final iterations were upheld by the D.C. Circuit despite the PCJF’s continued objection to remaining rules that determined how posters were regulated based on the content of the words.
The PCJF and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs filed a federal lawsuit against the Laurel Maryland Police Department for publicly strip-searching Allan Sergeant during a baseless traffic stop which occurred solely on the basis of racial profiling. The lawsuit ended with a $125,000 settlement for the plaintiff.
