American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to protect and uphold the United States’ Bill of Rights. Traditionally,the organization has focused primarily on guaranteeing individuals’ rights to free expression, equal protection under the law, due process, and privacy.
The ACLU was officially formed in 1920 by a group of social activists that included Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and Albert DeSilver. The organization grew out of the movement to protect conscientious objection and free speech during World War I. Since then, the ACLU has held a consistent, prominent position in the discussion of constitutional rights and their relation to contemporary issues. Throughout its history, the organization has taken strong public stances on a variety of civil liberty issues, including those related to school prayer, obscene materials, abortion, drug decriminalization, public demonstration, and privacy invasion.
After extensive growth during the opening years of this century, the ACLU now claims more than 400,000 members in state and local chapters nationwide. It is headquartered in New York City, with a sizable national legislative office in Washington, D.C. However, most of the organization’s work is conducted by its state and local affiliates, of which there are over 50. Annual dues and contributions from members provide the ACLU’s primary financial support, although it also receives some grants from private foundations and individuals. The ACLU does not receive government funding. Additionally, the organization is politically unaligned; it does not officially support or oppose political candidates or ideologies. It operates under the belief that everyone’s rights are threatened if one person’s rights are not protected. As a result of maintaining this absolutist approach to civil liberties, the organization has drawn criticism for defending such controversial groups as Nazis, Communists, and the Ku Klux Klan.
In its work to protect civil liberties, the ACLU pursues a variety of initiatives, including community-based activism and legislative lobbying. Still, its most prominent and effective efforts have been in the nation’s courts, as the organization regularly takes on cases in which civil liberties are possibly threatened. The organization handles close to 6000 such court cases each year, and it appears before the United States Supreme Court more than any other group outside of the federal government. In those civil liberty cases where it is not directly involved, the ACLU also frequently submits amicus curiae briefs in support of its position. The ACLU has at times referred to itself as “the nation’s largest law firm,” a claim that is supported by the organization’s national network of local offices and its corps of nearly 5000 affiliated attorneys.
These extensive legal resources have been key to the organization’s development and to its success in the courtroom. With them, the ACLU has influenced a variety of notable court decisions. For instance, the organization provided defense counsel in such landmark cases as Stromberg v. California (symbolic speech), Engel v. Vitale (school prayer), Brandenburg v. Ohio (inflammatory speech), Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (student rights), Edwards v. Aguil-lard (science education), and Cruzan v. Director of the Missouri Department of Health (right to die). The ACLU also provided amicus curiae briefs in key decisions including Hirabayashi v. United States (wartime internment), Brown v. Board of Education (school segregation), Gideon v. Wainwright (right to counsel), and Miranda v. Arizona (police interrogation).
The ACLU has also been active in the movement to preserve and protect individual privacy. As might be expected, their most notable effects in this area have been recorded in a number of Supreme Court decisions. Perhaps most notably, the ACLU represented the defendant the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision that struck down a state ban on contraceptive use. In the decision, the Court cited “marital privacy” and acknowledged that although not clearly stated in the Constitution, privacy was protected by “several fundamental constitutional guarantees.” Additional cases related to reproductive rights, including United States vs. Vuitch (1971), Eisenstadt v. Baird (1971), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), further defined this position. The ACLU has successfully protected privacy rights in other contexts as well. For instance, Chandler v. Miller (1997) cited the Fourth Amendment in invalidating a Georgia state statute that required political candidates to submit to urine tests.
Taken together, these decisions have helped further define and clarify privacy rights under the law. However, privacy remains a primary focus of the ACLU. In the early years of this century, the ACLU has become increasingly concerned with the growth of a “surveillance society” in which corporate and governmental organizations pose new threats to personal information and privacy. The organization’s “Technology and Liberty Project,” for instance, currently focuses on a myriad of privacy issues. As part of this project, the ACLU has challenged the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act), Internet censorship, and breaches of online anonymity.