Court Cases
Featured Cases
Jun 25, 2022
Planned Parenthood Association of Utah v. State of Utah (2022)
The ACLU of Utah filed a lawsuit on behalf of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah against the State of Utah and its Trigger law.
Jan 06, 2026
Vonnegut v. Utah
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Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law, originally enacted in 2022 and amended in 2024, requires public schools and their libraries to remove a wide range of literature under unconstitutional, overbroad criteria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.
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56 Court Cases
May 21, 2018
ACLU of Utah Foundation and Disability Law Center v. Davis County (2018)
After Davis County rebuffed our multiple requests to obtain the standards and audits for its county jail, we joined with the Disability Law Center to file a lawsuit to force the county to turn over these records.
Feb 27, 2018
Ramirez v. Reddish (2018)
On Tuesday, February 27, 2018, the ACLU of Utah Foundation, Inc. announced a new lawsuit filed against United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S Marshals over two SWAT-style, home raids on a Utah family living in Heber City in April 2017.
Feb 25, 2016
Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission v. San Juan County et al (2016)
The lawsuit, on behalf of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission, and seven members of the Navajo Nation, challenges the County’s decision to switch to a mail-only voting system, and designating the only location for in-person voting, that adversely impacts Navajo voters.
Apr 13, 2015
Roe v. Patton (2015)
The ACLU of Utah and the national ACLU LGBT Project filed a lawsuit to force the State Office of Vital Records and Statistics to recognize a married same-sex couple as legal parents of their child.
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