Cases We Accept

Before accepting a case, The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma considers:

Does the case raise a civil liberties or civil rights issue?

Civil liberties include freedom of speech, press, religion, and association; due process; equal protection; and privacy.
Civil rights include, for example, voting rights; discrimination based on disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or national origin, and police reform.
Because of the nature of civil liberties claims, only rarely does the ACLU of Oklahoma take a case that does not involve the action or inaction by a governmental entity.
If you would like to find out more about what kind of cases the ACLU will take, please see the national ACLU website ^[1].

How likely is it that a court will reach the civil liberties issue?

Generally, the ACLU takes cases that do not involve complicated disputes of fact, and prefers cases that involve questions of law only. An example of a factual dispute is an employment discrimination case in which the employer claims he fired the employee because of poor job performance and has credible evidence to support that claim, but the employee disputes the evidence and has credible evidence of her own. Because employment claims are usually very fact dependent, it is not often that the ACLU of Oklahoma takes this kind of case.
We often decide not to accept cases involving factual disputes because: (1) if a court resolves the facts against the client, it may never reach the civil liberties or civil rights issues; (2) if the decision rests upon the specific facts of a case, the case is less likely to have broad impact on many people; and (3) we have so few volunteer and staff attorneys that it is difficult for us to devote attorney time to resolving factual disputes.

We also consider the potential impact a case may have on civil liberties at large, including:

We also must look at what resources would have to be allocated to a particular case.

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