Legislation

During last year’s legislative session, the ACLU was highly supportive of a special legislative commission to study sexual harassment in the workplace and the legislation that arose from it. We support the reintroduction of the legislation, which was never brought to the House floor for a vote.

Rather than confronting the issues that cause individuals to engage in panhandling, this bill sought to ban the practice instead and would have fined a motorist for passing anything out of their window to another individual while in an “active lane of travel.”

Article 5, Section 9 of the first version of the proposed FY 2020 budget included, amongst other potential taxes on "services," a proposed 7% sales tax on "lobbying services", which we argued amounted to a direct levy on the exercise of political speech, a quintessential First Amendment activity.

The ACLU has been vigilant in opposing “solutions” to the opioid epidemic that compromise patient rights, including their right to confidentiality.

Often, seemingly innocuous licensing bills have provisions including expansive and vague language which could render individuals with a criminal background, no matter what crimes they have been convicted of or how long ago their conviction was, unable to procure certain occupational licenses.

This bill was designed to strengthen a law that requires courts to consider a criminal defendant’s ability to pay before assessing exorbitant costs, fines or fees.

This bill would have granted access to student names, addresses, and phone numbers to military recruiters unless the student or parent of the student opted out of having this information made available.

The Reproductive Privacy Act preserves the status quo of abortion healthcare in Rhode Island, and ensures that the shifting ideology of the Supreme Court does not impede upon a person’s right to choose.

In a remarkably quick beginning to the legislative session, a resolution to adopt rules for the House of Representatives for the years 2019-2020 made its way out of committee and to a floor vote within the first two weeks of the session.