LOS ANGELES The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a preliminary injunction that stops the City of Los Angeles from enforcing its unconstitutional "aggressive solicitation" ban. When the city passed the ordinance, Municipal Code ﾌ_ 41.59, in July 1997, the ACLU of Southern California filed suit challenging the ordinance on First Amendment grounds; a preliminary injunction was granted, and the city appealed.

"This order is the handwriting on the wall for the city," said ACLU of Southern California staff attorney Peter Eliasberg, "It's a clear signal that the court sees this ordinance as unconstitutional. It's time for the city to put this issue behind it and strike this ordinance."

The ordinance defines "aggressive solicitation" so broadly that simply making a request for assistance a second time when someone has indicated no desire to be solicited would be prohibited. It also bans any type of solicitation in certain areas: near an ATM machine, near public transit stops, or on public transit vehicles, for example. It is written so broadly that it could be applied to solicitors from the Salvation Army, Greenpeace, or the Busriders Union -- all of whom solicit public support in the public areas this ordinance marks as off-limits, and it also empowers numerous public, private, and quasi-public officials to determine whether or not free speech will be permitted, without offering any guidance about how those decisions should be made.

"This ordinance and others like it are a gag order on the most needy," said Eliasberg. "Essentially it says, 'You can talk about the weather to anyone, whether or not they want to listen -- but don't tell someone twice that you're hungry.' That's a callous and capricious restriction, one that may serve the comfort and convenience of those who are better off, but is completely inconsistent with our Constitutional rights."

"The First Amendment is for everybody," said Eliasberg, "rich or poor."

LOS ANGELES - The effect of California's welfare reform policies will be less punitive and capricious as a result of a settlement approved by the court yesterday in Nickols v. Saenz, a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups on behalf of poor women and children statewide. The lawsuit challenged the state's application of a "family cap" policy, called the Maximum Family Grant rule, to welfare families without giving them proper advance notice.

The lawsuit, filed by the Western Center on Law and Poverty, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the National Center for Youth Law, focused on the rights of parents and teens receiving welfare (now called CalWORKs), to fair warning about California's "Maximum Family Grant" (MFG) rule. This rule denies benefits to any baby born to a family that is already receiving welfare. It applies to adult parents who have a second child, but it also applies to teens who have their first child while living in a family on welfare.

The lawsuit challenged the state's failure to warn families about the implications of the MFG rule for teen parents. The facts of the individual plaintiffs' cases highlight the injustice of penalizing teen parents who had never heard of the MFG rule, by denying aid to their newborn babies. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit included four young parents struggling to finish high school, and to feed, clothe and house themselves and their babies, on as little as $305 per month.

"The stated purpose of the Maximum Family Grant rule was to influence welfare families to delay having more children," said Clare Pastore, staff attorney at the Western Center on Law and Poverty. "But without clear advance notice, the rule wasn't even consistent with its own dubious premise that poor families base childbearing decisions on welfare benefits -- it was simply punitive."

The settlement provides relief to young parents and their children currently suffering from the unfair effects of the MFG rule, by restoring benefits to their children. In the future, teens who have babies after receiving proper notice will still be subject to the MFG rule, but only until they become adult heads of households. The settlement also requires the state to improve its notices to families about the MFG rule, so that heads of families will understand and explain the impact of the rule on teens living at home.

"More than any other group in our society," said Rocio Cordoba, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, "poor women and children live the results of other people's rhetoric and social experimentation based on unfounded stereotypes. They understand through hard, real-life experience how laws can be used unfairly to express society's hostility."

"This case involved serious issues of economic survival and basic human dignity," said martha Matthews, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. As a result of the settlement, thousands of children will receive desperately needed aid, and families will have fair warning about the MFG rule in the future."

LOS ANGELES - Civil rights groups filed a motion today to require that the State of California ascertain whether public school students have textbooks to use in class and at home in each of their core subjects. The motion asks the California Superior Court to appoint a neutral expert to design and carry out a survey of California teachers asking them about the availability of textbooks in their classes. In its response to requests for information in the ACLU's landmark education case, Williams v. California, the State of California stated that it does not know whether public school students in California have books to study and claimed that it has no responsibility for ensuring that they do.

"Students and teachers are back to school," said ACLU of Southern California staff attorney Peter Eliasberg, "but the State of California is playing hooky. It simply does not know what it ought to know and has no plan to find out. There's no control and no responsibility, and as a direct result many California students still don't have the most basic of all learning tools: a book."

In fact, the defendants in the class action lawsuit, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, the California Department of Education, and the State Board of Education, confirmed their ignorance of public school students' access to textbooks and other instructional materials.

When asked recently to identify California public schools in which the availability of textbooks falls short of state standards, defendants's attorneys replied, "Defendants do not have this information. The extent of educational materials in all districts is unknown."

The defendants' attorneys also maintained that the State Board of Education is not "in charge" of determining if "textbook availability falls below district-set standards."

The California Legislature, on the other hand, has clearly recognized that the California Constitution requires the state to ensure that all students have textbooks and other instructional materials.

In 1994, the Legislature declared that, "...education is a fundamental interest which is secured by the state constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law, and...to the extent that every pupil does not have access to textbooks or instructional material in each subject, a pupil's right to educational opportunity is impaired." (uncodified Section 1 to Education Code section 60177).

"When schools fail, students have rights guaranteed by California's Constitution," said Jack Londen, partner at Morrison & Foerster, pro bono co-counsel in the case, "but the State's educational agencies don't respond, and don't even know when public schools fail to provide every student with the books and materials required for learning."

"Students across the state, from Watsonville to Los Angeles," said Catherine Lhamon, staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, "are struggling to learn grammar, foreign languages, math, science, and history without a book to take home and study. In an era of high-stakes testing and fiercely competitive university admissions, the lack of a textbook can alter the course of their lives. Someone has to take some responsibility for this."

Students who don't have textbooks expressed anger and frustration about the difficulties they face in learning.

"It makes me mad not to have books," said Manuel Ortiz of Watsonville, a junior. "I don't remember things quickly, so it's hard for me to learn, even if I have books. I really need a book to take home so I can learn."

"We mostly don't get homework in my math class because we don't have books," said Silas Moultrie, an eighth grader at Luther Burbank Middle School in San Francisco. "Without books, we're not getting the education we should be getting."

"Nobody at the state level knows whether students are receiving texts," said Londen. "They're just signing the checks. That's not the return the people of California expect or deserve for our investment in education. An obvious first step is to get an accurate idea of the extent and severity of the problem. The state should have a system for finding that out, but it doesn't. This motion seeks to address that gap in basic accounting."

The suit is brought by the ACLU affiliates of California, Morrison & Foerster LLP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Public Advocates, Inc., Center for Law in the Public Interest, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Professors Karl Manheim and Alan Ides, Peter Edelman of the Georgetown University Law Center, and Robert Myers of Newman. Aronson. Vanaman.