Defending democracy: The crucial role of taxpayer lawsuits

For more than a century, California taxpayers have had the power to sue public agencies and officials to fight corruption and other unlawful activities.

But now, the state high court will soon hear a case, Raju v. Superior Court, that could dramatically curtail what has been indispensable in the public's toolbox for holding government officials and agencies accountable to the people they serve.

Taxpayer lawsuits are a vital remedy for challenging systemic violations of individuals' constitutional rights and other harmful practices that would otherwise go unchallenged in the courts. That's because plaintiffs often face extraordinarily high -- sometimes impossible -- barriers to establish standing in ordinary civil actions.

Federal courts require a plaintiff to establish that they were directly harmed by a particular policy or action. And if they are seeking an injunction, they need to show that they will suffer harm in the future if the policy is not remedied. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have made that already-demanding requirement even more difficult.

Not so with taxpayer lawsuits. Since 1909, the Code of Civil Procedure Section 526 has granted any individual or corporation that pays taxes broad standing to seek injunctive relief against illegal government expenditures and waste. This law was passed alongside other foundational Progressive Era-reforms like the voter initiative and direct primary elections. And, like those reforms, taxpayer standing was intended to promote citizen participation and government accountability.

In Raju, however, court officials from the San Francisco Superior Court are calling on the California Supreme Court to exempt state courts -- and potentially all state officials -- from taxpayer lawsuits altogether. They argue that Section 526's references to "local agencies" limit taxpayer standing only to cases challenging local governments' actions -- even though California courts have uniformly held for decades that taxpayers can sue state officials and agencies.

The Raju case was brought by several taxpayer plaintiffs, including San Francisco County Public Defender Manohar Raju. They challenged the San Francisco Superior Court's failure to prioritize the scheduling of criminal trials during the height of the COVID pandemic, as required by state law and the Constitution. As a result of the court's policies, hundreds of criminal defendants languished in jail and were denied their right to a speedy trial. Nearly 200 people were subjected to 23 hour-a-day lockdowns in their cells.

The trial court dismissed the taxpayers' complaint. However, the Court of Appeal reversed that ruling and allowed the lawsuit to move forward. The appellate court explicitly recognized that Section 526a should be interpreted liberally. It also noted that taxpayers had consistently used the statute to sue state officials and agencies in the past.

The San Francisco court officials then went to the California Supreme Court, which agreed to review their petition. The parties have completed briefing and the case is awaiting oral argument.

The high court must prevent San Francisco court officials' undemocratic efforts to undermine taxpayer standing. The need for accountability does not stop at the courthouse doors. Like other government institutions, courts and judicial officials sometimes adopt unconstitutional policies or misuse public funds. When that does happen, taxpayer lawsuits are often the most effective -- and sometimes the only way -- to stop the abuses.

Two years ago, the ACLU of Northern California used taxpayer standing to challenge San Mateo Superior Court's practice of automatically imposing a $300 charge every time someone missed a payment or court deadline in their traffic case. These so-called "civil assessments" were often six-to-eight times greater than the base fine for the traffic infraction and imposed severe hardship on poor people. As a result of the lawsuit, Debt Collective v. Superior Court of California, San Mateo Superior Court agreed to stop imposing civil assessments. Meanwhile, the Judicial Council of California issued new guidance in 2023 to all state trial courts stressing that judicial officers have discretion to reduce or eliminate these assessments altogether based on a person's individual circumstances.

In May 2023, the ACLU of Northern California and our partners filed a taxpayer lawsuit, UFW Foundation v. County of Kern, challenging Kern County Superior Court's operation of a "fast track" misdemeanor plea mill. The complaint alleges that court and county officials unconstitutionally extracted thousands of guilty pleas every year from defendants who had never even met with an attorney.

In both these cases, the plaintiffs turned to taxpayer litigation to compel the courts to change their policies and practices. That's because other efforts to change them had repeatedly failed. In Kern County, for example, some of the people who were pressured into pleas raised claims against the illegal process in their individual cases. They even filed complaints against particular judges. Yet these individual actions couldn't achieve widespread, systemic reform -- and sometimes couldn't even prevent harm for the person who filed them.

Taxpayer standing allows taxpayers to bring meritorious claims against the government on behalf of the public at large. As the California Supreme Court put it nearly fifty years ago, taxpayer litigation functions as "a general citizen remedy for controlling illegal governmental activity." White v. Davis, 13 Cal.3d 757, 763 (1975). Since the turn of the 20th Century, it has enabled Californians to hold government officials to account whether they work for the Department of Motor Vehicles, the County Board of Supervisors, or the Superior Court.

The California Supreme Court must reject San Francisco court officials' efforts to diminish this fundamental public right.

The ACLU of Northern California has filed an amicus brief supporting the taxpayer plaintiffs in Raju v. Superior Court.