Supreme Court Term 2025-2026

The lawsuit, Arctic Village Council v. Meyer, sought to waive a provision of state law for the November general election that requires voters who submit a mail-in absentee ballot to have a witness sign their ballot return envelope even in the midst of a highly contagious and deadly pandemic.

In October 2017, the Trump administration secretly adopted rules governing the use of lethal force in drone strikes and other killings abroad. These rules, known as the “Principles, Standards, and Procedures,” reportedly loosen Obama-era safeguards against civilian casualties outside “areas of active hostilities.” On October 30, 2017, the ACLU filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking public disclosure of these new rules. When the government failed to release them, we filed a lawsuit on December 21, 2017, to force their disclosure. The government responded by refusing even to acknowledge that the new rules exist. We challenged this unjustifiable secrecy—and on September 29, 2020, a federal court ordered that the government cannot keep the existence of its new killing rules a secret. Our fight to expose the contents of the rules goes on.

On September 30, 2020, WRP and ACLU-MO filed a complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief in the Western District of Missouri on behalf of KC Tenants, a local grassroots organization that seeks to advance fair housing access to renters. The lawsuit challenges the Jackson County Circuit Court's administrative order that purports to implement the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) nationwide eviction moratorium, but instead permits eviction cases to move forward in violation of it, putting hundreds of Missouri tenants at risk for eviction in violation of federal protections.