Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse


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, and moved in 2009 to 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 It posts both historical documents, like the original court complaint and the trial transcript in Brown v. Board of Education, and more modern ones, like the settlement agreement in Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, a fair lending case President Barack Obama litigated in the 1990s. It has received funding from the National Science Foundation 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, deal with intellectual property, and securities class action 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:

Scope of Collection

According to its website:

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.