Carol Sobel is a civil rights lawyer and advocate who has repeatedly sued the City of Los Angeles for violating the rights of protestors and the unhoused population. Ms. Sobel graduated from Douglass College in 1968 and the People’s College of Law in 1978. She spent 20 years working at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California until she left in 1997 to start her own practice.
After the Rodney King uprising in Los Angeles in 1992, she was one of three lawyers who worked on revising the LAPD’s Crowd Control and Use of Force policies. She served as lead co-counsel in several cases challenging police practices at the Democratic National Convention in 2000 in Los Angeles. She also served as class co-counsel in Multi-Ethnic Worker Immigration Network (“MIWON”) v. City of Los Angeles, resulting from the LAPD’s assault on nearly 5,000 people involved in a peaceful immigration rights rally on May Day 2007. She also served as class co-counsel in Aichele v. City of Los Angeles in 2011, brought on behalf of 300 individuals arrested for camping on City Hall lawn as part of Occupy Los Angeles, and Chua v. City of Los Angeles, on behalf of a large group of protestors arrested in the demonstrations that followed the decision of the Ferguson grand jury not to indict the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown.
Currently, Ms. Sobel is lead co-counsel in Black Lives Matter Los Angeles v. City of Los Angeles, a class action filed in federal court on behalf of more than 4,000 persons arrested in the city in protests against the killing of George Floyd and other persons of color by law enforcement around the country, as well as individuals subjected to use of force in the form of “rubber bullets” and batons deployed against the Floyd protestors.
Ms. Sobel also represents the Los Angeles Press Club in a number of cases resulting from First Amendment violations by federal law enforcement, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department over the last year at recent ICE raids and No Kings protests.
She co-chaired the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee for 10 years, helping to build capacity to advance the rights of protestors around the country, including for the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests in Miami in 2003 and national political conventions in New York and Minneapolis.
Ms. Sobel was a long-standing board member of the National Police Accountability Project. She is currently an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School, where she teaches a civil rights practicum.