Public Citizen Litigation Group
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Public Citizen Litigation Group is the litigating arm of the non-profit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The Litigation Group’s attorneys specialize in cases involving health and safety regulation, consumer rights, separation of powers, access to the courts, class actions, open government, and the First Amendment, including Internet free speech. Since 1972, it has litigated cases at all levels of the federal and state judiciaries, including over 50 cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.[1]
Its efforts are pursued through such programs as the Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project, the Consumer Justice Project, the Internet Free Speech Project, and the Freedom of Information Clearinghouse.
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[edit] Alan Morrison Supreme Court Assistance Project (SCAP)
Named after Litigation Group founder, Alan Morrison, SCAP was founded to try to rectify what the Litigation Group perceived to be an imbalance in the practice before the Supreme Court. Typically, business clients are well-represented before the Court, often by experienced Supreme Court practitioners, backed by all of the resources large corporations can offer. Often, on the other side are small firm practitioners with little or no Supreme Court experience. SCAP seeks to fix this imbalance by lending the Litigation Group’s experience and expertise in Supreme Court practice to the underdog, through assistance with writing briefs and conducting moot courts.[2]
[edit] Consumer Justice Project
Started in 2005, the Consumer Justice Project litigates individual and class action cases that offer a chance to establish important precedents on behalf of consumers. Working with other non-profit organizations and private consumer attorneys, the Project’s role may include representation on appeal, amicus support, briefing on important motions, or co-counseling from the inception of a case.
[edit] Internet Free Speech Project
Since 1999, the Litigation Group has defended First Amendment rights online, protecting the rights of ordinary citizens against powerful forces that seek to curtail or suppress the exchange of ideas and criticism that the Internet allows. The project's focus is on representing individual citizens and consumers, although they have also written amicus briefs and assisted other lawyers with their briefs. Cases have involved the right to speak and read anonymously on internet message boards; the use of brand names in web site domain names, metatags and keyword advertising; the right to maintain interactive discussions; and file-sharing. Recently they have also defended the rights of small online merchants targeted by large corporations that claim selling less expensive second-hand or competing products infringes the company's intellectual property rights. [3][4]
[edit] Freedom of Information Clearinghouse
The Freedom of Information Clearinghouse is a joint project of Public Citizen Litigation Group and Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law. It provides technical and legal assistance to individuals, public interest groups, and the media who seek access to information held by government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). [5]
[edit] Important Litigation
[edit] Fighting Ineffective or Unlawful Agency Action
The Litigation Group brings many cases under the Administrative Procedure Act to challenge agency regulations or other actions that are arbitrary and capricious or unlawful. For example, in 2001, after 9 years of delay, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had not issued a rule to regulate use of the highly toxic chemical hexavalent chromium, the Litigation Group successfully brought suit to force OSHA to issue a rule (Public Citizen v. OSHA). [6]
In 2004, the Litigation Group along with Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH), and Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT) successfully challenged the final rule governing the hours of service of commercial truck drivers, issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The advocacy groups claimed that the rule expanded the hours that truckers may legally drive, failed to mandate the use of electronic onboard recording devices to put an end to the pervasive violations of legal limits, and would likely to lead to many avoidable deaths and injuries on the nation’s highways.[7]
In 2002, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a rule to implement a law that required a device in new vehicles to warn drivers when a tire was significantly underinflated, but the rule allowed use of devices that would not warn when two or more tires were underinflated, the Litigation Group successfully sued to force NHSTA to issue a rule that complied with this important safety measure (Public Citizen v. Mineta).[8]
[edit] Open Government
From its founding, the Litigation Group has devoted a significant portion of its efforts to fighting government secrecy. It has litigated more FOIA cases than any other organization.[9] The Litigation Group has secured from government files information about health risks, safety issues, and financial problems, on behalf of other divisions within Public Citizen, other public interest organizations, reporters, and academics. Among material of significant public interest obtained through its efforts are approximately 2,000 pages of Lt. Col. Oliver North's notebooks (National Security Archive v. National Archives and Records Administration)[10] , the report relied on by the Attorney General to exclude Kurt Waldheim from the United States (Mapother v. Department of Justice), [11]and all but one paragraph of the government’s secret brief filed before the Supreme Court in the “Pentagon Papers” case (Sims v. Department of Justice). [12] In recent years, Litigation Group lawyers have devoted significant resources to litigating issues surrounding preservation of and access to electronic records. In the case Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, Litigation Group lawyers succeeded in establishing that electronic records generated by the White House and the rest of the Executive Branch are subject to federal open records laws. At the end of both the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration, the government had claimed that it was entitled to delete all of the electronic records created and stored by the White House during each president’s tenure. As a result of the litigation, in which the court agreed that FOIA required that executive branch e-mail be preserved, the government released more than 3,000 e-mail records from the White House and the National Security Council.[13]
[edit] Supreme Court Practice
Since the Litigation Group was founded in 1972, its lawyers have argued 51 cases before the United States Supreme Court—including four cases during the Court’s 2005-2006 term.[14] The Litigation Group’s victories include:
• INS v. Chadha (1983), the landmark case holding that a legislative veto violates the constitutional principle of separation of powers.
• Jones v. Flowers (2006), a victory for due process rights, in which the Court ruled in favor of an Arkansas man whose house was sold by the state after mailed notice of the impending forfeiture was returned undelivered.[15]
• Medtronic v. Lohr (1996), which rejected the medical device industry’s broad claims to immunity from product liability suits and held that the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not preempt such suits.[16]
• Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Consumers Council (1976), which challenged a prohibition against price advertising by pharmacies and established the test for evaluating restrictions on commercial free speech.[17]
• Richardson v. McKnight (1997), which held that prison guards for-profit prisons under contract with the federal government do not have qualified immunity in suits alleging violations of constitutional rights.[18]
