California Lawyer magazine recognizes

Stanley Youngas an Attorney of the Year for his

extraordinary achievement in 2013 in

Civil Rights

Young won a huge victory against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, with a team including Covington & Burling attorneys Andrew Byrnes, Tammy Albarrán, Lesli Gallagher, and David Hults in California; the ACLU Arizona; the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and

the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Arpaio, who has a national reputation as a mouthpiece for the anti-immigration movement, was the target of a class action brought by Latino residents who alleged that his office engaged in unconstitutional racial profiling.

In May, after 11,000 hours of pro bono work by the Covington team, District Judge Murray Snow found in favor of the plaintiffs. In October, he issued a 59-page order detailing new oversights for the sheriff’s office, including a court-appointed monitor and other major injunctive measures such as expanded data collection on traffic stops and bias training for all of Arpaio’s officers. (Melendres v. Arpaio, 2013 WL 5498218 (D. Ariz.).) Arpaio’s legal team filed a notice of appeal, but meanwhile the prescribed changes will proceed.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Manuel Ortega Melendres, was legally visiting Maricopa County in 2007 when he was arrested during a traffic stop and unlawfully detained. Now, says Dan Pochoda, Legal Director of the ACLU Arizona who worked alongside Young, law enforcement agents know that “terrorizing communities of color” is something they can’t get away with.

California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year