“Planning, preparing, and filing or defending law suits focused on changing laws or on the rights of specific groups of people.”
When telling family and friends about my new job as the Legal Director for Kansas Appleseed, working on impact litigation, I was nearly always met with the same response: “You’re doing what now?” Fair question. After all, most people have never heard the phrase impact litigation. So, what is impact litigation?
Typical definitions of impact litigation (like this one) do little to help answer the question: impact litigation is “planning, preparing, and filing or defending lawsuits focused on changing laws or on the rights of specific groups of people.” (Harvard Law School). Put simply, however, impact litigation is a critical tool in an advocate’s toolbox for bringing about systemic change.
Kansas Appleseed has used this tool several times over the last eight years, but there are many more impact-litigation cases out there than you might realize. Take Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, for example. It is not just a monumentally important case in the fight for equality and civil rights in this country; it is also an excellent illustration of impact litigation in action.
In Brown, thanks to the bravery of the plaintiffs and tenacity of their attorneys, the United States Supreme Court made it clear that separate but equal is neither equal nor constitutional. Advocates for school integration had tried unsuccessfully for years to get legislators to pass laws prohibiting segregation in public schools. Finally, they changed tactics and took the issue to the courts. In one ruling, the Supreme Court made segregation illegal in every public school in the country.
But that was not enough; someone had to make sure schools actually integrated. Impact litigation has helped fill that role in the 72 years since Brown.
Usually, any discussion about Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ends with the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling. Stopping there omits a very important part of the case’s history: one of the original plaintiffs reopened the case in 1978, this time it was her children who attended Topeka public schools. The reopened case is commonly known as Brown III, and it wasn’t closed until the 1990s.
Brown III was necessary because in the more than 20 years since the Court’s landmark ruling in Brown, Topeka schools had made relatively little progress toward integration. True, Kansas law no longer allowed for segregated public schools, and none of Topeka’s schools were segregated . . . on paper. In reality, however, lawmakers had instituted various policies that allowed Topeka’s public schools to remain largely segregated. The plaintiffs ultimately won in Brown III, which led to new policies and practices meant to actually integrate Topeka’s public schools by 1998.
Thus, in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka cases, litigation served two main purposes: (1) establishing the unconstitutionality of segregated schools when legislatures would not do so on their own, and (2) enforcing that law when the government tried to get away with only desegregating schools on paper but not in fact. As a result, the plaintiffs brought about systemic positive change—the hallmark of impact litigation.
Kansas Appleseed’s legal team operates with the same purposes and goals in mind but focuses on issues impacting Kansans. Our past impact litigation efforts included improving placement stability rates for children in the foster care system, challenging the constitutionality of the City of Wichita’s gang database, and fighting against voter suppression laws.
To learn more about lawsuits we have been or are currently involved in, visit our website.
