SLC joined a coalition of LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in North Central Florida to push for Alachua County to pass a ban on conversion therapy for minors. Conversion therapy is a harmful and scientifically denounced practice with the goal of changing or reducing one’s same-sex attraction or altering a person’s gender identity through physical treatments like aversive conditioning, and a variety of behavioral, cognitive, and psychoanalytic practices.

All people should be able to access places of public accommodation, including facilities that offer lodging, food, entertainment, health care, professional services, or recreation. However, federal and state law currently do not provide explicit protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at places of public accommodation. Several cities and counties, including Gainesville, have added sexual orientation and/or gender identity as protected classes under local human rights ordinances to provide these protections.

Plaintiffs Jami Claire, Kathryn Lane, and Ahmir Murphy are state employees who have been denied medically necessary treatment for gender dysphoria because of the state’s categorical exclusion of coverage for medically necessary gender-affirming care in health care plans provided to state employees. Some transgender people experience gender dysphoria, the medical diagnosis for the clinically significant distress sometimes resulting from the incongruence between a person’s gender identity and their sex assigned at birth. Left untreated, this serious medical condition often leads to debilitating distress, depression, anxiety, impairment of function, and self-harm, including suicide.

In a landmark case widely cited by courts, SLC established the right of public employees to receive a name-clearing hearing after termination of their employment when stigmatizing information has been made part of the public record or otherwise published.

SLC represented extremely low-income tenants who were evicted from their apartment building with less than a day’s notice because the City of Orlando had decided to condemn the building. The federal appeals court agreed with SLC that tenants have a constitutional right to contemporaneous notice of their right to a hearing in a condemnation action against the apartment owner. This opinion is the touchstone of federal due process law in the Eleventh Circuit and is cited by courts in hundreds of other cases. We co-counseled with Greater Orlando Area Legal Services and pro bono counsel Cathy L. Lucrezi.

A person with a severe and persistent mental illness who had been institutionalized for significant periods of time was found not competent to proceed to trial after a charge of aggravated battery, and she was confined to the forensic unit at Florida State Hospital (FSH). After confinement and treatment for about two years, FSH reported that she would not regain competency. The trial court determined that state law required her to be confined for five years.

Issuing a preliminary injunction, the federal district court prohibited the Agency for Persons with Disabilities (APD) from terminating or reducing Medicaid Waiver recipients’ benefits prior to affording them an evidentiary hearing. As a result of the preliminary injunction, SLC negotiated a settlement with APD that resulted in a permanent injunction that applies to the putative class of more than 4,000 individuals with developmental disabilities.

On behalf of homeless people who were trespassed from city parks, this case established that all people enjoy a constitutionally protected liberty interest to be in public places of their choosing and that the government must provide due process if it deprives people of this right by issuing trespass warnings. Co-counsel were the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and Florida Institutional Legal Services.

In a statewide class action, SLC represented persons with developmental disabilities who challenged, under federal due process, the adequacy of notices being used to reduce services in a new Florida Medicaid Waiver program—the iBudget program. A mediated settlement resulted in: 1) cessation of arbitrary reductions of services; 2) reinstatement of millions of dollars in benefits for the settlement class, impacting thousands of people; 3) policy changes to ensure notice is sent to both the person and his/her legal representative; and 4) policy changes to provide notices in English and in the person’s primary language. Nancy E. Wright was co-counsel.

Southern Legal Counsel represented Patrick McArdle, Courtney Ramsey, and Anthony Cummings, three individuals experiencing homelessness who had been repeatedly arrested under the city’s open lodging ordinance that made it a crime for homeless persons to sleep outside. The City also issued trespass warnings, banning them from returning to public parks permanently without providing an opportunity for a hearing.