RBGG represents two people with disabilities and four disability rights groups in a lawsuit filed in 2023 challenging California’s assisted suicide law. A lower court dismissed the case, which is now on appeal. On March 26, 2025, RBGG’s Ernest Galvan argued on behalf of plaintiffs before the Ninth Circuit, as detailed in an article in the Courthouse News Service, Disability groups appeal for another chance to block California’s assisted suicide law.
According to Galvan, the law creates “a system where you’re constantly getting the message that you’re better off dead.” Explaining the standing of one of the plaintiffs, he argued that “Communities Actively Living Independent and Free’s core business activities is to help people with severe disabilities overcome the desire they may feel to end it all and to see that you can live a full life in the community despite your disabilities, and the state’s regime of assisted suicide, of creating this model where the state endorses just killing yourself, that directly injures that core business activity for Communities Actively Living.”
In response to a question from on of the justices on the Ninth Circuit panels, Galvan argued that people with disabilities “have a fundamental right to be free of state action that encourages suicide.” A video of the full argument is available here.