The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse is a website that posts information and documents relating to civil rights litigation. The Clearinghouse was founded by law professor Margo Schlanger in 2005, at Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...

, and moved in 2009 to the University of Michigan

University of Michigan

The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

.

The Clearinghouse makes its information and documents available at no cost to policy-makers, researchers, advocates, teachers, students, and the general public. 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 It posts both historical documents, like the original court complaint and the trial transcript in Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...

 (at http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/SD-KS-0001-0008.pdf and http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/SD-KS-0001-0002.pdf), and more modern ones, like the settlement agreement in Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, a fair lending case President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

 litigated in the 1990s (at http://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-0008.pdf). It has received funding from the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 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 School is a graduate school at Stanford University located in the area known as the Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. The Law School was established in 1893 when former President Benjamin Harrison joined the faculty as the first professor of law...

, deal with intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

 (the Stanford Intellectual Property Clearinghouse, at http://www.lexmachina.org/), and securities class action litigation (the Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, at http://securities.stanford.edu/, co-sponsored by Cornerstone Research

Cornerstone Research

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

).

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.

External links

• http://clearinghouse.net
• http://www.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