With the rise of anti-war protests and encampments taking place on college campuses across the country, we are sharing an episode from a couple of years ago that addresses some questions related to free speech in an education setting. In this episode, our resident free speech expert Ben Wizner answers listener questions. You’ll hear us talk about the different first amendment protections at K-12 schools and universities, which vary between public and privately funded institutions. We are monitor...
May 02, 2024•33 min
Today, on April 24, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will determine the future of emergency abortion care. At issue in the case of Idaho v. United States is whether or not doctors in states where abortion is banned have to continue to deny abortion care—even in emergency settings—despite the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires all hospitals to provide life saving and medically stabilizing health care to anyone who shows up at their emergenc...
Apr 24, 2024•31 min
On April 22, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass, the most significant court case about the rights of people experiencing homelessness in decades. At its core, Grants Pass will decide whether cities are allowed to punish people for things like sleeping outside with a pillow or blanket—even when there are no safe shelter options—posing potentially great risk to the 250,000 Americans who sleep outside on any given night. This case comes at a time when the affordable hous...
Apr 18, 2024•32 min
From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I'm Kendall Ciesemier, your host. A month ago, we visited one of our favorite spots, the library. You know, at the ACLU, we love a good library. So much so that we even spent a recent Saturday night at the Brooklyn Public Library, along with some 5,000 others, for their annual enrichment event, Night in the Library. The theme for this year's event was Out of Darkness, and it included an all-night lineup of performances and conversations focused on what it means...
Apr 11, 2024•23 min
Last December, Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 4, one of the most extreme pieces of anti-immigrant legislation to emerge from any state legislature. Under S.B. 4, local and state law enforcement can arrest people they suspect to have entered Texas without federal authorization. It also permits Texas judges, who are not trained in immigration law, to order the deportation of migrants to ports of entry along the Texas-Mexico border, regardless of which country they are from. Additionally, indiv...
Apr 04, 2024•31 min
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that will determine if nationwide restrictions are imposed on access to mifepristone, a safe medication used in more than half of all U.S. abortions, and for miscarriage treatment. What the court decides later this year will have significant implications on our ability to access abortion, no matter where you live, even in states with legal protections for abortion. The decision could also impact how other medications are protected from...
Mar 28, 2024•30 min
The United States is home to the largest immigrant population in the world, with hundreds of thousands more seeking asylum and citizenship. America would not be what it is today if not for immigration and the contributions of millions of those who have come here, bolstering the population, strengthening the economy, and weaving their cultures into the fabric of this nation. And yet, despite this truth, many immigrants in the U.S. and those seeking entry at our borders continue to face a bureaucr...
Mar 21, 2024•33 min
The “American dream” has long been regarded as the pinnacle of success, rewarded to all who display hard work and pick themselves up by their bootstraps when life knocks them down. This might be our culture’s prevailing narrative, but it actually rarely bears out this way. The truth is that our system is full of inequities that put large swaths of people in our country at significant odds with building wealth. Intergenerational wealth, or the passing on of wealth within generations of a family, ...
Mar 14, 2024•37 min
At the end of 2023, migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high of 250,000, with a surge of individuals and families entering cities like Chicago, Denver, New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. Despite this, politicians and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle continue to struggle to meet demands and refuse to compromise on border policies, leaving the wellbeing of asylum seekers in jeopardy. In early February, a sweeping supplemental funding package for national security failed ...
Mar 07, 2024•32 min
On February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law, meaning the embryo has rights consistent with a person living in the United States. While this marks the first time a frozen embryo has been granted personhood, it is not the first time we’ve seen anti-abortion lawmakers elevate and amplify the idea of so-called “fetal personhood,” in an attempt to strip away rights from people who can become pregnant and people who are. While contained to the state...
Feb 29, 2024•30 min
On August 10th, 2009, the North Carolina legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, or RJA. A first of its kind law that allows people on death row to challenge their sentences if they could show race played a factor at the time of their trial. This historic legislation allowed us at the ACLU to successfully bring claims on behalf of four people back in 2012, getting their sentences changed to life without parole. This momentum was short lived, because a year later, the North Carolina Supreme Co...
Feb 22, 2024•33 min
Since 1965, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) has been integral to protecting people of color at the polls. But in recent decades, the strength of the VRA has been diminished by decisions like Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and the subsequent influx of voter restrictions imposed by states. Despite this, there are ways we can fight back in the courts. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in certain language minorit...
Feb 15, 2024•33 min
Free speech on campus, book bans, education gag orders, the overturn of affirmative action, the resignation of former Harvard president Claudine Gay. All of these issues center on one hot-button topic: DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has become a staple in national vocabulary after the so-called “racial reckoning” of 2020 brought demands for racial justice to the top of institutional priorities. From schools to Fortune 500 companies to the film industry, DEI efforts had a steady surg...
Feb 08, 2024•34 min
As the gang conspiracy trial of rapper Young Thug and his famed rap collective, YSL, extends past 20 days in Atlanta, we’re bringing you a conversation about the use of rap lyrics in court. Despite a groundswell of activism and legal opposition against the legal admissibility of Young Thug’s lyrics, a judge ruled in November that lyrics from Young Thug and other YSL artists can be used by the state against them as evidence pointing to the gang’s existence and the members’ attitudes towards the c...
Feb 01, 2024•38 min
This week, At Liberty is coming to you live from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, hosting a discussion with queer and transgender storytellers. The conversation delves into the challenges they face while navigating an onslaught of bills targeting trans people nationwide and censoring their narratives. This dialogue follows a recent decision by the Utah state House to advance HB 257, a bill that would criminalize trans people for using the bathroom—a stark example of the many t...
Jan 25, 2024•41 min
This year marks the 51st anniversary since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, protecting the constitutional right to abortion in 1973. Unfortunately, this anniversary is marred by the overturn of Roe by the Supreme Court in 2022, resulting in the continued denial of the power to make personal medical decisions during pregnancy for millions of people in states across the country. In 2024, our fight for reproductive freedom continues. In the last several weeks, the Supreme ...
Jan 18, 2024•31 min
Last year, states passed a record number of bills restricting health care, athletics, public accommodations, expression, and educational materials for trans people — trans kids, more specifically. With the turn of a new year, the situation continues to grow dire. Laws threatening access to gender-affirming care went into effect in several states on January 1, 2024. The ACLU is calling on the Supreme Court to block a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for trans people under the a...
Jan 11, 2024•45 min
“Imagine that you, at age fifteen, have been sentenced to social death, life without parole, in a space nine feet by seven—the size of a freight elevator—where for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day you are trapped; where in a deadly daily routine you sleep, wake up, shit, piss, eat—food slipped through a slot as if you were an animal, where you are denied the possibility of human contact except as physical or mental abuse; where visual and sensory stimuli—the stuff of life—are only a memory ...
Jan 04, 2024•37 min
For a special year-end holiday episode, we’re bringing you our third edition of “ACLU kids take over At Liberty.” Kids of ACLU staff spoke to their parents about what they do at work and how they fight for civil rights and civil liberties. They also had some hot takes about how they can do better — at everything. We hope you enjoy it.
Dec 21, 2023•29 min
2023 is coming to a close, and we have weathered so much this year. At the ACLU, we continue to fight for civil rights and civil liberties across the country. We’re prying open every opportunity for abortion access and reproductive health care following the overturn of Roe, blocking trans health care bans nationwide, filing lawsuits to curb the rise in book bans and educational censorship, and advocating for racial equity after the elimination of affirmative action and continued attacks on votin...
Dec 14, 2023•32 min
Free speech is one of the hallmarks of a functioning democracy and one of our fundamental constitutional rights. At the ACLU, we know that it's precisely in times of crisis and fear when free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent are most important. Over the last few months, as the world continues to witness the catastrophe in Israel and Palestine, protests in support of Palestine are being silenced and censored on college campuses. In early November, the ACLU sent out an open letter to the ...
Dec 07, 2023•31 min
On January 21, 2017, a day after the inauguration of former President Donald Trump, activist and journalist Raquel Willis approached the podium at the inaugural Women’s March in Washington, D.C. to share her story at what became one of the largest single-day marches in U.S. history. With this momentous platform, Willis was determined to galvanize the crowd to support liberation for all women, namely Black trans women like herself. Not even three minutes into her speech, after calling out the era...
Nov 30, 2023•36 min
The holiday season is upon us. This week, we are revisiting our conversation with author and activist Glennon Doyle. In this conversation, Doyle and host Kendall Ciesemier discuss how to bring loved ones into our understanding of equity and justice through the use of storytelling, imagination, and conversation. It’s an episode fit for such a time as this and we hope you enjoy.
Nov 21, 2023•45 min
If you’re staying up to date with the news, you may have noticed that unions are having a moment. This summer alone, strikes by members of the WGA, UAW, SAG-AFTRA, UPS, Starbucks, Amazon, and Kaiser Permanente unions, among others, have made headlines and signaled solidarity between workers across the nation. Last year, public support for unions hit a 57-year high, with 71% of Americans expressing a favorable opinion. However, unions themselves are not a utopia. At the ACLU, we’ve sided with and...
Nov 16, 2023•33 min
On Tuesday, people across the country took to the polls and made one thing crystal clear: abortion rights matter to voters. In Ohio, voters passed an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, making it the seventh state to protect abortion access through the ballot box. In Virginia, voters elected a full pro-abortion rights majority in their state General Assembly, and in Pennsylvania, voters maintained a pro-abortion majority in their state supreme court. As we look to 20...
Nov 09, 2023•38 min
On October 24, Britney Spears released her tell-all memoir, “The Woman in Me.” In the book, she traces her journey from childhood stardom to living 13 years under the control of a conservatorship, a court-sanctioned arrangement that strips people with disabilities of their civil liberties. In Spears’ case, her dad, who she characterizes in the book as abusive and an addict, was able to gain legal rights over her life and her business when Britney was 26-years-old. This included forcing her to wo...
Nov 02, 2023•48 min
On November 7th, Ohio voters will decide whether to pass Issue 1, which would protect their decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and abortion. The fact that this amendment is even on the ballot is a huge feat. Ohioans had to submit hundreds of thousands of signatures to get the reproductive freedom amendment on the ballot this fall. Fearing that voters will take power into their own hands to protect reproductive rights, anti-abortion politicians forced a different a...
Oct 26, 2023•37 min
October marks LGBTQ History Month, and this week on At Liberty we are honoring the legacy of LGBTQ activism throughout the AIDS epidemic. Throughout the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, AIDS claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers per year, with city, state, and national governments doing little to address the crisis. In response to government inaction and homophobia, a group of New York City activists founded ACT UP, a grassroots, queer-led protest movement to urge action, call for change, and s...
Oct 19, 2023•35 min
This May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 264, a law that restricts Chinese nationals from acquiring property in the state of Florida under the guise of protecting national security. But the issue is actually pretty clear — Chinese people are not the Chinese government, and conflating the two is just the latest iteration of anti-Asian land laws and anti-Asian discrimination that date as far back as the 1880s. Rather than protecting national security, the law will shatter the dreams of Chinese famili...
Oct 12, 2023•40 min
Today’s young people have a lot to deal with. Pandemic interruptions, social isolation, climate change, political polarization, ever-changing technology — all on top of the typical turbulence of adolescence. Studies on youth mental health outcomes show increasing loneliness and hopelessness, illustrating one thing: the kids are not alright. We all want a silver bullet for the youth mental health crisis, and some lawmakers are claiming they have one: the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA for short....
Oct 05, 2023•34 min
