The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a website that serves as a searchable resource for information and documents relating to civil rights litigation. The Clearinghouse was founded by law professor

Margo Schlanger Margo Jane Schlanger (born 1967) is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, and the founder and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Previously, she was at Washington University School of Law. From 2010 to ...

in 2005, at

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

, and moved in 2009 to the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

.Cynthia Georges, Civil rights legal papers compiled on law site, Washington University Record (Nov. 2, 2006), http://record.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/8087.html The Clearinghouse makes its information and documents available at no cost to policy-makers, researchers, advocates, teachers, students, and the general public.Preserving History (Editorial), St. Louis Post Dispatch (Dec. 5, 2006)Margo Schlanger & Denise Lieberman, "Using Court Records for Research, Teaching, and Policymaking: The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse", 75 U.M.K.C. L. Rev. 153 (2006) With 15,000 monthly visitors, it is the leading Internet source for the thousands of cases it covers, allowing the public unprecedented access to case documents, including court complaints and settlements. It posts both historical documents, like th
original court complaint
and th
trial transcript
from

Brown v. Board of Education ''Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka'', 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segrega ...

, and more modern ones, like th
settlement agreement from Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank
a fair lending case President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

litigated in the 1990s. It has received funding from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

and acknowledgement in newspaper editorial pages. The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is one of three law-school-based case Clearinghouses. The others, both at

Stanford Law School Stanford Law School (Stanford Law or SLS) is the law school of Stanford University, a private research university near Palo Alto, California. Established in 1893, it is regarded as one of the most prestigious law schools in the world. Stanford La ...

, deal with

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

(th
Stanford Intellectual Property Clearinghouse
, and securities class action litigation (th
Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse
co-sponsored by

Cornerstone Research Cornerstone Research is a litigation consulting firm based in the United States and the United Kingdom. It provides economic and financial analysis and expert testimony to attorneys, corporations and government agencies involved in complex lit ...

Mission

The goal of the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is to solve the informational scarcity that undermines understanding of large-scale civil rights cases. It describes the problem on its website: : ''Civil rights litigation has been of tremendous import in this country, especially since the 1950s. The injunctions entered in civil rights cases have transformed a huge number of governmental institutions--schools, prisons, mental health facilities, housing authorities, police departments, child welfare agencies, etc. Injunctive cases have closed some institutions and opened others, dominated budget politics, become models for statutory interventions, and generally regulated practices. Thousands of such cases have been filed over the past fifty years and new cases are filed all the time; hundreds, old and new, are ongoing and remain influential. But information about the cases has always been exceedingly hard to come by.''

Scope of Collection

According to its website: : ''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, Criminal Justice, Disability Rights-Public Accommodations, Education, Election/Voting Rights, Equal Employment, Fair Housing/Lending/Insurance, Immigration, Indigent Defense, Intellectual Disability (Facility), Jail Conditions, Juvenile Institution, Mental Health (Facility), Nursing Home Conditions, Policing, Prison Conditions, Public Accommodations, Public Benefits & Services, Public Housing, School Desegregation, Speech and Religious Freedom.''

Functionality

Users can search for cases by case-type, facility, court, location, court, issue, lawyer, or judge, or any combination. Case documents are posted in pdf. In addition, civil rights biographies and case-studies are cross-indexed.

References

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External links

* http://clearinghouse.net * https://web.archive.org/web/20100108175549/http://lexmachina.org/ * http://securities.stanford.edu/ * http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/SD-KS-0001-0008.pdf * http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/SD-KS-0001-0002.pdf * http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-0008.pdf Online archives of the United States Web archiving initiatives American digital libraries