Court Cases

The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah Foundation, Inc. (ACLU of Utah), alongside law firms Parr Brown Gee & Loveless and Spencer Fane, LLC, filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the District of Utah on behalf of the Estate of Kurt Vonnegut, award-winning authors Elana K. Arnold, Ellen Hopkins, and Amy Reed, and two anonymous Utah public high school students. By disregarding the literary value of age-appropriate books and removing them, Utah is trampling on the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, originally enacted in 2022 and amended in 2024, requires public schools and their libraries to remove a wide range of literature under unconstitutional, overbroad criteria imposed by the state legislature. Among the books removed are major award-winning and best-selling works, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a National Book Award winner and one of Time Magazine’s “100 Best English-Language Novels,” and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Many of the banned titles target voices that have historically been silenced, authors of color, women, and LGBTQ+ writers. These removals include Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner; Elana K. Arnold’s What Girls Are Made Of, a National Book Award finalist; and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a Pulitzer Prize nominee whose author received both the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

On May 18, 2024, a police officer approached Maryon and said her name while she participated in a peaceful pro-Palestine protest. In January 2025, charges were brought against her—including walking in the road and disorderly conduct—which were both inflammatory and legally unsound.  

The ACLU Disability Rights Program, the ACLU of Utah Foundation, Inc. (ACLU of Utah), and the Disability Law Center (DLC) filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Utah against the State of Utah seeking to block the implementation of SB199.

The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court to allow the plaintiffs to continue their studies by reinstating them in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) registry.

The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative and Trone Center for Justice and Equality, along with the ACLU of Utah and the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, filed an amicus brief defending the civil rights and liberties of people experiencing homelessness.