First Amendment Rights

Heller Ehrman successfully represented a group of Sikh school children in a Ninth Circuit Petition seeking to protect the children's right to attend school while wearing the ceremonial kirpan (knife) under their clothes. The wearing of the symbolic kirpan is required by the children's religious practices.

In Woods v. Noelle, Heller Ehrman attorneys represented a Muslim inmate's successful appeal of a district court ruling that denied him his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Laurence Woods was a Muslim inmate at the Multnomah County Inverness Jail in Portland, Oregon, who claimed that the defendants violated his constitutional rights by desecrating copies of the holy Qur’an, preventing him from performing his early morning and evening prayers, preventing him from eating until sunrise during the Ramadan fast, and denying him the feast of Eid al-Fitr to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Shortly after the Ninth Circuit remanded the matter for additional proceedings, Heller Ehrman pursued a settlement with the defendants that not only ensured that our clients constitutional rights would be upheld, but also established practices that would enforce the rights of all other Muslim inmates.