Cyrus Dugger

NEW CIVIL RIGHTS LITIGATION CLEARINGHOUSE

To see this new tool, click here. Here's the website description:

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a collection of documents and information about civil rights cases in selected case categories across the United States. Currently, the categories include: Child Welfare, Disability Rights, Election/Voting Rights, Immigration, Jail Conditions, Juvenile Institution, Mental Health Facility, Mental Retardation Facility, Nursing Home Conditions, Police Non-Profiling, Police Profiling, Prison Conditions, Public Housing, School Desegregation.

The site is dedicated to injunctive rather than damages litigation—that is, to cases seeking policy or operational change, not cases seeking money. For each of the categories, our eventual goal is to include a close-to-comprehensive catalog of the cases in which plaintiffs have actually been awarded or negotiated such change. (With the exception of the election/voting case category, we have made no effort to include the thousands of cases in which plaintiffs sought an injunction and did not receive either negotiated or court-mandated relief of some kind; in most case categories, very few cases meeting this description are included.)

For each included case, we have attempted to gather the crucial documents, including: the docket sheet, which indexes the litigation's progress from filing to termination; the complaint, which initiated the litigation; any decrees issued by courts or agreed to by parties; and any published opinions. (For opinions published via Lexis or Westlaw, we provide links to those services rather than the opinions themselves.) We also provide at least some information about each case: where, when, what was involved, outcome, available published judicial opinions, case study research, and available documentation. Interested parties should be able to use the docket sheet to decide if they wish to pursue further research, via the federal court's PACER system, the National Archives or another source.

We are happy to consider new categories of cases, new cases in current categories, and new documents. You can propose additions to the Clearinghouse using one of our suggest pages (category, case, document).

Currently, the Clearinghouse is posting at least partial information on 1217 cases, including a litigation summary for each as well as; 6863 dockets, complaints, filings, settlements, court orders, and other documents; and citations to 3900 opinions. We also post case studies of individual litigations, written by law students.

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Posted at 8:35 AM, Feb 07, 2007 in
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