As several other people on the panel have said, litigation is expensive, and as you can imagine, constitutional litigation requires amassing a considerable evidentiary record from lay witnesses and expert witnesses. Even if you're able to secure pro bono lawyers, who are willing to do all of the legal work for free, there are all sorts of disbursements that you need to fund, such as bringing those experts together, paying for those experts to provide reports for the court, typically through three levels of court, and at the trial level. Inevitably these cases get appealed at least once, if not twice, to the Supreme Court.
The cost for us as an organization for bringing a case is quite significant, because it takes staff resources away from the other work that we do day-to-day in education and other parts of our mandate. We're already working with shoestring budgets. I believe it was Cynthia Petersen who had said that the amount of the funding was really seed funding. It's a drop in the bucket of the general budget for a big test case litigation challenge. For us, it's the fact that there is some dedicated money there that will allow the case to move forward. We won't have to depend on the vagaries of fundraising and different donor tendencies whether they will fund a particular case or not, as well as having to rely on the insecure and unstable process of seeking funds dollar by dollar to try to put together enough money to even launch the first part of it.
For us, it's very much a necessary part of doing that impact litigation that we think is important and that allows us to enhance and promote equality rights through the charter.
