by Margaret Crosby

About the author: Margaret Crosby, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, wrote an amicus curiae brief in Aguilar v. Avis on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

Editor’s Note: On August 2, 1999, in a case known as Aguilar v. Avis, the California Supreme Court upheld a judge’s order prohibiting a supervisor at the Avis Rent-A-Car in San Francisco from using ethnic slurs against Hispanic employees.

“Man bites dog,” media accounts proclaimed, reporting on the American Civil Liberties Union’s support of the injunction against workplace racial slurs in Aguilar v. Avis, decided by the California Supreme Court on August 2, 1999. That people were surprised by our position is, perhaps, not surprising. The ACLU is identified in the public’s...