Protecting Civil Rights

Racial Justice

LFAA Posthumous Pardons Project

A Sidley team of summer associates researched and answered 10 questions presented in the 50-state Posthumous Pardon Process survey for the states of Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia. This initiative is part of the Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), a program at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston that investigates racial violence in the Jim Crow era and other historical failures of the criminal justice system. This initiative aims to lay the groundwork for granting posthumous pardons to Black people who were wrongly convicted and executed as a result of their race.

LGBTQ+ Rights

LGBTQ+ Victory in Illinois

Sidley lawyers provide pro bono services in a range of matters of significance to the LGBTQ+ community, including marriage equality, political asylum, and immigrants’ right cases for openly gay, HIV+, or transgender clients, as well as adoption/parental rights cases. We have worked on cases for Immigration Equality, the National Immigrant Justice Center’s LGBTQ+ Immigrant Rights Initiative, and Whitman-Walker Health, among other organizations.

In 2023, a Sidley team, working with our colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union, won a significant First Amendment victory on behalf of our client Aurora Pride, an LGBTQ+ rights group in suburban Chicago. Aurora Pride sponsors the annual pride parade in Illinois’ second-largest city, but ran into roadblocks after asking Aurora police officers to “participate out of uniform and without official vehicles” — a request rooted in concern over the tension that has sometimes been found between the police and various communities, including the LGBTQ+ community. Offended by this request, some police officers declined to provide security for the parade. The City then amended its Special Events Ordinance in a way that made it clear that parade permits could be denied or canceled if too few officers volunteered to work the parade. In other words, parade sponsors with unpopular messages were at risk of being denied permits based on the message they wanted to send — an outcome directly at odds with the First Amendment. Aurora Pride filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Aurora and its police chief, and the presiding judge agreed that aspects of the Special Events Ordinance violated the First Amendment, and could not be enforced because it allowed individual police officers the discretion to decide about the viability, scope, and cost of protected speech in the community. As a result, the 2023 parade was able to proceed as planned. The victory received significant local media coverage, including reports by The Chicago Tribune, CBS News, and ABC7 television.‍

Religious Liberties

Protecting Religious Beliefs

Sidley, together with the Yale Law School Free Exercise Clinic, filed an amicus brief on behalf of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) supporting the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (the Orthodox Union) in an appeal involving the ministerial exception of the First Amendment. In this case, a former mashgiach, or kosher-food supervisor, sued the Orthodox Union under California law, alleging unpaid wages. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the ministerial exception of the First Amendment barred the claims and awarded summary judgment to the Orthodox Union. The case is now on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The Orthodox Union, a nonprofit corporation, represents several hundred congregations across the U.S. and provides numerous services and programs to the Orthodox Jewish community, including kosher certification. The observance of kashruth, or keeping kosher, is one of the most important rituals in the Jewish faith. The masghichim who certify that food products were prepared in accordance with kashruth must be Sabbath-observing Jews with knowledge of Jewish law.

The amicus brief argued that applying the ministerial exception requires a “functional approach” to determining both whether an individual is a “minister” and whether an entity is a religious organization. A “rigid approach” that safeguards only traditional understandings of both ministers and religious organizations would be “ill-suited to the diverse composition of American religious life” and would fail to protect minority faiths, such as ISKCON, that often have unfamiliar beliefs and practices. The brief also argued that the ministerial exception applies broadly to all legal claims stemming from the relationship between a religious organization and its ministers, including wage-related claims.

Through Yale’s Free Exercise Clinic, students work under the supervision of Sidley lawyers to represent clients under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as analogous state constitutional provisions and laws.