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This collection is growing. This growth is not limited to increasing the size of noted case categories, but also new categories as well.
Jail Conditions (543 completed / 32 in process)
Prison Conditions (570 completed / 49 in process)
Juvenile Institutions (153 completed / 12 in process)
 This part of the collection is, we believe, the largest existing compilation of information about injunctive correctional litigation. The cases span the time period from 1956 to the present. With only a handful of exceptions, we have included only cases in which plaintiffs either won or settled for some type of reform decree. We plan to add recent jail strip search class actions, as well. This case category does not currently include, however, ordinary damage actions—no matter how significant or large the damages awarded.
Immigration (286 completed / 4 in process)
The Clearinghouse has a very deep collection of relatively recent immigration class action cases, as well as cases involving large numbers of plaintiffs that are not, technically, class cases. These range widely: we include, for example, suits about conditions of confinement in immigration detention; suits about civil rights violations at workplace immigration enforcement raids; suits alleging RICO violations by employers of undocumented workers, etc. Our sources include the American Immigration Lawyers' Association (AILA), the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project, and many other organizations and lawyers.
Mental Health Institutions (40 completed / 7 in process)
Mental Retardation Institutions (88 completed / 1 in process)
The Clearinghouse collection includes conditions and habilitation litigation, and is particularly strong with respect to cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
The Clearinghouse does not currently include the cases that make up the modern major deinstitutionalization litigation campaign, implementing the Supreme Court's decision in Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 521 (1999), that
the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids unnecessary institutionalization of people with disabilities, including mental disabilities. For information on Olmstead litigation,
see the Bazelon Center's resource page
and the Center for Personal Assistance Services Olmstead report. We hope to include these cases soon.
Child Welfare (2 completed / 19 in process)
These are cases concerning the operation of state child welfare systems—foster care, abuse and neglect investigations, etc. As with most categories, we have decided in this category to collect only injunctive cases (no cases in which the plaintiff sought damages without policy or operational change). And at least currently, we are including only cases in which the plaintiff was at least somewhat successful, either winning in court or settling with a major reform decree. We do not have a comprehensive collection, but are looking to improve it in the coming months. Many of these are state cases, which makes documents and information more difficult to collect. For more information on some of these cases see Childrens' Rights Inc.
Nursing Home Cases (21 completed / 0 in process)
Most nursing home litigation seeks damages rather than injunctive relief, and is therefore outside the scope of our current collection. We do have a number of civil injunctive cases and criminal settlements, in which the United States brought charges under the False Claims Act against corporations that operated nursing homes, and settled for a set of policy and operational changes specified in the court documents included here. If you know of any additional nursing home cases, we would appreciate information about them.
Policing Cases (58 completed / 11 in process)
The policing collection is not comprehensive. But it contains a great deal of information not readily available elsewhere, about injunctive cases involving alleged racial profiling as well as non-profiling cases about use of force and other issues.
Public Housing (3 completed / 17 in process)
The Clearinghouse has just the beginnings of a collection on public housing desegregation. Additional information about this case category, including in-depth analysis of a number of individual cases, is available in a 2000 report to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, available here.
School Desegregation (9 completed / 50 in process)
School desegregation litigation has been the model of civil rights litigation since 1954 and the first decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Collecting the many hundreds of school desegregation cases and their thousands of opinions poses significant challenges, which we hope to take on over the next several years.
Currently we have only the very beginnings of a collection, including a substantial number of otherwise-inaccessible documents from Brown itself, and a document that is extraordinarily useful for historical research—the United States' voluminous description of every school desegregation case from 1955 to 1966, in the states then comprising the 5th Circuit (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississipppi, Texas). This appendix was filed, in four volumes, in U.S. v. Jefferson County.
Until our collection grows, we refer users to see Brown University's School Desegregation site.
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The Clearinghouse has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation.
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