On Monday, April 22nd, the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case out of Oregon that could have national implications on homelessness policy. The question at the heart of Grants Pass v Johnson is whether cities can regulate where and when people can sleep outside, especially if there isn’t shelter space available. Jeremiah Hayden, a reporter for Street Roots Newspaper, tells us about the oral arguments, and the case in Grants Pass that started it all. We also hear from Sara Rankin, Associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, about how the oral arguments played out.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this morning, the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for a case that came out of Oregon. Grants Pass v Johnson could reshape the way cities and states all across the country respond to homelessness. In a few minutes, we’ll talk to a legal scholar about what actually happened at the oral arguments. But we start with some background on this case. Jeremiah Hayden is a reporter for Street Roots Newspaper. He covered this story in Grant’s Pass and was at the Supreme Court earlier this morning, Jeremiah, welcome.
Jeremiah Hayden: Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. How did this case start?
Hayden: This case started in 2018. The Oregon Law Center filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Debra Blake. Deborah Blake ultimately passed away in 2021, and Gloria Johnson and John Logan stepped in as class representatives, as the case made its way through the appeals process. The city of Grants Pass had basically made it impossible for homeless people to exist in the city limits at all, without being punished with civil or criminal penalties.
Miller: What does the city of Grants Pass want to do?
Hayden: Well, sort of explicitly, they want people to move out of the city. People are required to move every 72 hours. Officers come to parks every Monday and Thursday, hand out eviction notices, give tickets. You know, code explicitly bars anyone from sleeping in public spaces – that includes parks, sidewalks, in cars – or using any sleeping materials for what they say is the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live.
Miller: So, what are the plaintiffs, what are homeless residents arguing?
Hayden: Well, the question at the center of this is whether these ordinances constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Grants Pass says that the criminal punishments are necessary tools for enforcing the laws banning homeless people from public spaces. But the lawyers and the homeless residents in Grants Pass say that those penalties against people who have nowhere else to go is cruel and unusual punishment, which violates the Eighth Amendment.
Miller: There is one shelter in Grants Pass, but it’s fairly restrictive. What are the rules?
Hayden: The Gospel Rescue Mission is a religious organization. It is not an emergency shelter, where someone can just show up, get a place for the night. There were none of those, actually, in Grants Pass until last week, when the city actually voted to open one. But the Gospel Rescue Mission opened in 1983, and it requires people to abstain from substances, which include nicotine. People have to attend daily Christian services, turn over all of their medications. It doesn’t allow socializing with the opposite sex except to approved events. And of course, gender and sexuality is acknowledged in what they call “biblical terms.”
Miller: Are there any other options, right now, for people experiencing homelessness in Grants Pass? I mean, this gets to the question of scale – of the people who are homeless right now, and the options that are available to them.
Hayden: Right, that is a main point because Martin v Boise is another Ninth Circuit Court decision that serves as the backdrop for this case. And that one says that you can’t criminalize people when they have no place to go, but that also implies that if people have a place to go, then you can establish your time, place and manner ordinances.
So the City Council, with some resistance from people who didn’t necessarily want a shelter in their backyard for many years now, did last week actually vote for this organization, MINT [Mobile Integrative Navigation Team], to open a navigation center that can also act as an emergency shelter during inclement weather, which would adhere to local laws about when certain thresholds are met for weather. But really, literally, there isn’t a place where someone within the city of Grants Pass can say, “I’d like to sleep inside tonight rather than outside,” and then just simply go there.
Miller: The city was pretty transparent about wanting to make things difficult for homeless people in Grants Pass so that they would go elsewhere. There’s a quote that’s gotten a lot of attention that you read about – that The New York Times picked up as well – from 2013. I’m curious about what you heard more recently, from residents in Grants Pass – both housed and unhoused – about the current tensions there.
Hayden: There’s a lot of tension there, and it’s not unlike anywhere else in the United States, where people are concerned about crime and the homelessness gets wrapped into this “tough on crime” rhetoric. It’s really unfortunate, because people experiencing homelessness are disproportionately disabled people, people of color, Black people, LGBTQIA people, school children. You know, Josephine County has 756 school-age children who are homeless, so this is a big piece of that.
The housed residents are really bringing this crime stuff into play and not wanting this kind of stuff to come into their backyard.
The homeless residents in the city are, as ever, arguing that we need to have a place to go. The city has turned off the water at times, the restrooms are closed, and it produces a stereotypical version of homelessness that people might imagine – simply, the ordinances themselves simply produce that result.
Miller: Obviously, and as you mentioned, these issues have played out up and down – well, all over the country – but to a great extent up and down the West Coast. Why do you think it’s a case out of Grants Pass that made it all the way to the Supreme Court?
Hayden: It’s interesting, the facts in the case. There’s maybe no other place that’s quite as explicit, as of a decade ago, about what the intentions are, about making people so uncomfortable. You know, for one, the Oregon Law Center filed this case, and I did talk to Ed Johnson after arguments today – he’s the lawyer from the Oregon Law Center who opened this case in 2018, and he said, “You know, you can’t plan on something like this going to the court. It’s just statistically, who knows what’s ever gonna happen with that.”
But the ordinance itself is just so explicit in what it’s trying to do to people that it’s sort of inevitable that it would end up becoming an Eighth Amendment case about cruel and unusual punishment.
Miller: What was the scene like outside the courthouse this morning before oral arguments?
Hayden: There was actually a demonstration out there. I wasn’t able to be there because I was going inside the court for oral arguments at about the same time, but there was a lot of joy, honestly. There was music playing. People were laughing. And then the National Homelessness Law Center put together… to stage what they called a “lie-in,” where they would demonstrate what it is that Grants Pass is trying to criminalize, with people laying out with blankets. So there were a lot of people out there when I went inside the court. A few people actually even commented it’s not very common that people are out there early in the morning, but this is a real catalyzing moment for people who are trying to work on the homelessness crisis in America.
Miller: Did you talk to any folks who actually went to D.C. from Oregon or elsewhere on the West Coast specifically, so they could be there for oral arguments?
Hayden: I did. I met Helen Cruz when I was in Grants Pass. She was the first person I spoke to, and I talked with her public defender who really helped explain the difficulty of this constant way of being ticketed simply for being homeless in Grants Pass. And I talked to Helen, I texted with her last night, just to see if she made it into town. The Homelessness Law Center had flown her out to represent the people back home.
And she said she was very inspired by this. She said she was so inspired, and has this new sense of hope, meeting with all of these people who are working to help the most vulnerable among us. And she said she had almost given up on the idea that anyone even cared. And then said her faith in humanity has been restored. A few minutes, right before I came on here, she actually sent me a few photos of homeless Grants Pass residents who demonstrated with signs outside the Josephine County Courthouse this morning, at the same time the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments.
So this is a really big moment for people to be able to connect because these are in many ways local issues, but all politics is local, all the way to this national crisis that we all see.
Miller: What do you hear from lawyers from either side, after oral arguments?
Hayden: Yeah, I think we have some tape from Ed Johnson, if we want to play that tape.
Ed Johnson: It’s a good case to have in front of the Supreme Court. There are important issues and the facts in this case are just so egregious that, if the court’s going to hear it, this is a good case for them to hear it.
Hayden: He was really encouraged by the way that the justices were actually asking really critical, really thoughtful questions. And I felt the same way, that there’s a lot of talk about the status versus the conduct, and where to draw the line between a status – an involuntary status that a person can’t help – and the conduct that results from that status. And I felt that, really, all of the justices had really interesting conversations with the lawyers, but they’re, of course, talking to each other. And he told me that he felt really encouraged by how well that went, and how seriously they took the case for the people who are experiencing homelessness in America.
Miller: Jeremiah, Thanks.
Hayden: Thanks, Dave, so much for having me.
Miller: Jeremiah Hayden is a reporter for Street Roots.
We’re going to turn now to an analysis of the oral arguments. Sara Rankin is a professor at Seattle University School of Law and the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project. We talked about two hours ago, right after the oral arguments ended.
I started by having her remind us about the Ninth Circuit’s 2018 ruling in Martin v Boise. It’s a case that came up a lot in the back and forths.
Sara Rankin: The Martin v Boise case was decided in 2018, and it was a case that decided whether it was constitutional for the city of Boise to charge people criminally for camping in public space when there were no reasonable alternatives. In other words, when the city lacked sufficient shelter. And the Ninth Circuit in that case said, “No, that’s not constitutional under the Eighth Amendment which is the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”
So that case stands for the proposition that you can’t punish people for the unavoidable consequences of being human. And the Martin court applied that to protect people who were involuntarily homeless in the city of Boise, to protect them from being criminally punished for surviving outside when the city lacked sufficient shelter for them.
Miller: This was a Ninth Circuit ruling, meaning affecting basically the entire West Coast, a bunch of states. Are there any other similar rulings in effect in the rest of the country? I’m wondering if other states in the Midwest or the South or the East have similar legal regimes.
Rankin: Well, there have been cases in other circuits that have rendered decisions based on Martin, or have cited Martin. The Eleventh Circuit, for example, and the Fourth Circuit, both have rendered decisions that take Martin’s holding into account.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for just the breadth of cities and states and other jurisdictions who filed amicus briefs in support of Grants Pass? I mean, in some ways it seems like a “who’s who” of the American West.
Rankin: Yeah, there’s tens of them, I think it’s something like 39 amicus briefs…don’t quote me on that. I don’t know. It’s an awful lot. And what’s unique about the amicus briefs in support of the city of Grants Pass is that they had bipartisan support. So there were politically oriented entities that could be construed as both conservative and as progressive in favor of the Grants Pass appeal.
Miller: Let’s turn to the arguments themselves. So many of the back and forths touched, in one way or another, on a more than 60-year-old ruling called “Robinson.” What is it, and why was this so central to the proceedings today?
Rankin: Robinson is a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court case that held that it’s unconstitutional to punish someone for their status. And in that case in particular, what they were looking at was drug addiction. And the line that the court drew there was to say it’s unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment to criminalize someone – in other words, to charge them criminally – just because they’re a drug addict. There has to be conduct and that has to be conduct… for example, they said it is constitutional to punish someone for using drugs, but not for being a drug addict.
And the issue there is that it’s really inhumane, it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to punish someone for unavoidable circumstances that they can’t control – like their own status – or it’s the unavoidable consequence of one’s status or being.
Miller: I want to play a contentious back and forth between Justice Sotomayor and Theane Evangelis Kapur, the Los Angeles-based lawyer representing Grant’s Pass.
Justice Sotomayor: It’s only stopping you from sleeping in public if you… for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live. And the police officers testified that that means that if a stargazer wants to take a blanket or a sleeping bag out at night to watch the stars and falls asleep, you don’t arrest them. You don’t arrest babies who have blankets over them. You don’t arrest people who are sleeping on the beach, as I tend to do, if I’ve been there a while. You only arrest people who don’t have a second home. Is that correct? Who don’t have a home.
Theane Evangelis Kapur: So no, these laws are generally applicable. They apply to…
Sotomayor: Yeah, that’s what you want to say. Give me one example, because your police officers couldn’t. And they explicitly said, if someone has another home ‒ has a home ‒ and is out there and happens to fall asleep, they won’t be arrested…
fall asleep with something on them.
Evangelis Kapur: Well, joint appendix page 98 is one example of a citation issued to a person with a home address. But more importantly, I think what we’re getting at here is that these laws regulate conduct of everyone. There’s nothing in the law that criminalizes homelessness. I really want you…
Sotomayor: That’s what you say, but if I look at the record and see differently…
Miller: What was Justice Sotomayor getting at here? I mean, what is the heart of her questions?
Rankin: She’s really driving at whether what the city of Grants Pass is trying to do is to punish somebody for their status as opposed to their conduct. So, if anyone engages in illegal conduct, the conduct itself is punishable. That’s something that can be punished. But if somebody is being punished for their status – in other words, other people can engage in the same conduct, but the law is only being applied or they’re targeting certain groups ‒ then the way that the law is functioning is to punish people for their status, as opposed to the conduct.
There were a lot of really heated examples like that. I think another example that was brought up later on was how frequently people can go into the park and sit down and have a picnic with a blanket. Those people are not going to be fined for sleeping in public, even if they fall asleep.
But if somebody appears to be homeless, not only are they more likely to get cited, but in the city of Grants Pass, people have been cited so many multiples of times that they are shouldering thousands of dollars in debt. Some of the named plaintiffs have over $5,000 in debt just from existing in public space illegally. And those citations can, over time, turn into criminal charges for criminal trespass. So we’re talking about fining and ticketing, but also in a way that initially what might seem like a civil law issue then turns into a criminal law issue.
Miller: Let’s listen to another question. This is from Justice Jackson, and referencing that 60-year-old “Robinson” ruling.
Justice Jackson: It seems both cruel and unusual to punish people for acts that constitute basic human needs. So here,
unlike in Robinson where you had at least the sort of disease state, drugs and the like, and potentially culpable acts that relate to that disease state. Here, we’re talking about sleeping, that is universal, that is a basic function. And so I guess what I don’t understand is, in this circumstance, why that particular state is being considered conduct for the purpose of punishment.
Miller: How did the lawyer for Grants Pass, or just in general, how do proponents of Grants Pass’ policies, how do they respond to this basic question from Justice Jackson?
Rankin: Not very well. I thought that the councel for the city of Grants Pass really struggled with answers to that one, because Jackson and several of the other justices construed the law, I think, fairly. Since the law prohibits sleeping outside ‒ the definition of homelessness is sleeping outside because you don’t have a reasonable alternative, because you lack a fixed address. And so the Grants Pass councel really struggled with answering how that wasn’t something that was applied unfairly, or that targeted people who are experiencing homelessness.
The other thing I think that’s really important here is all of these sorts of arguments are really trying to push at whether homelessness is being punished as a status. And what I think that the counsel for the original plaintiffs did really well, the respondent in this case, would say that people should not be excused from engaging in otherwise criminal activity or criminal conduct, if anyone who did it would be in trouble. So some of the justices asked, “Well, what if somebody needed food? And so they stole food?” And the counsel for the plaintiff said that would be a problem. That would not be covered under the Eighth Amendment because anyone would be punished because that’s otherwise criminal conduct, stealing food is otherwise criminal conduct.
Sleeping is a universal human need and you cannot punish someone for engaging in the unavoidable consequence of being human. You can’t punish someone for undertaking a necessary life-sustaining activity. So that’s really what was at issue in that clip.
Miller: One of the issues that a few conservative justices brought up, Justice Thomas did, the Chief Justice Roberts, I think, brought this up as well, is that homelessness is a state or a status that can change frequently. You can go in and out of being homeless.
They made it a point to pin down various councel on this. Why? What’s at stake in that question, legally?
Rankin: They’re trying to press councel to really test the elasticity of this idea of status. The idea of status is, it’s easiest to identify someone’s status if it’s something that can’t be changed. For example, someone’s race. That sort of inquiry has gotten really messy in contemporary times, because, for example, gender used to be one of those statuses that folks thought was immutable. But now we understand that gender can be fluid, so that sort of inquiry is really pushing at the clearer cases in the law where you’re really focusing on status. If it’s status, it’s easiest to identify if it’s something that can’t be changed.
Miller: But to what end? I mean, is the real reason for poking there to say that if something is immutable, if it can change, then we should give less deference to defenses based on that status? Is that the real point of it?
Rankin: The real point of it, in addition to trying to figure out whether it’s a status versus a conduct thing, is to see if there’s a voluntariness to it. In other words, if someone is homeless because they’ve declined an offer of shelter, that is a circumstance where the justices and even the city of Grants Pass would say… actually everybody agrees that those sorts of circumstances are actually not covered in this case.
For people who are involuntarily homeless, the Eighth Amendment would apply, but for people who are voluntarily homeless ‒ in other words, they’re making a decision to be homeless when they could change their own circumstances ‒ that’s when the Eighth Amendment wouldn’t apply, because it’s going back to choice.
Miller: Let’s play a back and forth ‒ it’s a little bit long, but I think it’s worth it ‒ that gets to this question about choices and human actions. This is Justice Alito asking questions of the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Kelsi Corkran, who’s also the Supreme Court director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. This is the back and forth. Justice Alito will speak first.
Justice Alito: If the reason why the person finds himself or herself in that status is, for example, the person refuses to take anti-psychotic medicine that’s been prescribed, or refuses to go to drug rehab or rehabilitation for alcoholism, or the person has chosen to move from one place where the person might have a shelter or a home where the person could live, to another place... what about all of that?
Kelsi Corkran: So, the status of homelessness is something that only changes once the person has a home. You lose your home, you’re homeless. If you have a home again, then you’re not in the status anymore. I think what your question gets at is that second piece, which is whether a person has access to shelter. That can change from day to day.
Alito: That’s not really what my question gets at. The question is… you can draw a distinction… status is different from conduct, but there are some instances of conduct that are closely tied to status, or if homelessness is defined as simply lacking a place to stay on a particular night, they amount to the same thing.
The definition of homelessness encompasses the conduct of sleeping outside. So my question is, whether this is… what if the person finds that person in a homeless state because of prior life choices, or the refusal to make future life choices? That’s the question.
Corkran: So, our definition of lacking access to shelter is lacking physical or legal access to shelter. And you’re looking at the person’s situation on that particular night. I think generally,
we’re not doing an inquiry into all of a person’s life choices that might have led them to the point where they’re homeless and can’t find a place to sleep. Robinson certainly didn’t do that sort of analysis with respect to addiction, but there could be situations where there is such a tight causal nexus between a choice a person has made and their lack of shelter access that you would say this person has chosen not to take the shelter. And to be very clear, if you decline shelter that is physically and legally available to you, you’re not in our class.
Miller: What stands out to you in that exchange? Both the ideas behind Justice Alito’s question and the response from the plaintiff’s lawyer?
Rankin: I think the plaintiff’s counsel there did a beautiful job of really clarifying that this case is really just about the applicability of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against punishing people for involuntary conditions, so something that’s unavoidable. What Alito was really driving at there was, well, where do we draw that line? If someone made a bad decision years before, or in the future they’re gonna make a bad decision, how much does their bad decision, their culpability for their own situation, play into things? And councel there made it clear that the definition of accessibility, whether somebody has that choice, whether the shelter that’s offered to them, or if there is available shelter, whether that shelter is physically and legally available.
And so there was some sparring there in that circumstance around people… one of the harder hypotheticals is around people who have severe, untreated mental illness, because as councel goes on to say later in that clip – which you didn’t play – there are circumstances where legally and physically, you cannot have people with severe, untreated mental illness in certain congregate shelters.
One, there are congregate shelters that explicitly exclude those folks. And in other cases, there are circumstances where forcing people with severe, untreated mental illness into a congregate shelter is not only potentially harmful for others in that space, but it’s potentially, and often demonstrably, harmful to the person who’s being forced into that space. And that’s when the counsel for the plaintiffs pointed to the fact that in those instances, there’s probably other legal avenues like the ADA ‒ the Americans with Disabilities Act ‒ that would apply. So basically the point she was trying to make is that the line that’s clearest here is whether there is a shelter, whether there’s a space for someone to go to that is physically and legally available to them.
Miller: I wanna actually play another clip from Justice Alito. In general, the conservative Justices today seemed more favorable to the arguments made by the lawyer for the city of Grants Pass, but it wasn’t absolute. And this is one of the exchanges that shows how complicated this was if you were thinking about a strict partisan matrix. Let’s have a listen.
Alito: Robinson presents a very difficult conceptual question. Do you think that someone who is a drug addict is absolutely incapable of… that all people who are drug addicts are absolutely incapable of refraining from using drugs?
Corkran: Well, I think that for some that may be true and for some perhaps they can abstain, but that’s a question of free will and agency that’s true of every law and what conduct we choose to regulate.
Alito: All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?
Corkran: I think we’d have to ask all the questions I mentioned earlier about what alternatives they might have had yesterday...
Alito: They have absolutely none. There’s not a single place where they can sleep.
Corkran: If that’s true, then that may be the case, and in that case, at least in Oregon, they would have a defense of necessity.
Alito: So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside.
Miller: What is the necessity defense that the Grants Pass councel there brought up? It came up a number of times over the course of the two hours, or so, of oral argument.
Rankin: I just wanted to say in terms of Alito, the point he was trying to make there is that the Robinson decision ‒ that held that it’s unconstitutional to punish someone for being a drug addict because that’s a status ‒ Alito, and other justices, made that point repeatedly, that they think that this case is actually a clearer case where it’s a status rather than what had been decided in Robinson.
So you gave a good example of Alito surprising me by taking a position, or at least testing a position, that seemed to be more supportive of this case representing a status inquiry.
The second part of your question was really about the necessity defense. Oregon is a state that has a new ‒ I myself don’t know much about it ‒ I think it’s supposed to be a new state statute that basically ‒ I think at least once in the arguments, it was represented as trying to codify the Martin case. In other words, saying you can’t criminally charge people for the unavoidable consequences of being human, for engaging in necessary life-sustaining activity. However, there are real issues which also came up in the arguments about whether the necessity defense would be applicable here.
Some of the discussion centered around the fact that fines and fees, which are civil tools, would likely not apply. In other words, you couldn’t seek undoing a civil infraction or a fine or fee, only something criminal. The reason the court was belaboring this, and why it came up so often, is because they are desperately interested in avoiding rendering a decision. If there’s anything that you take out of the oral arguments today, it was that across the ideological spectrum on the justices, they were leaning towards something called constitutional avoidance. They want to avoid ruling where it’s not necessary. And they’d like to see if there’s a way to avoid rendering a decision in this case.
And if Oregon’s necessity defense could apply, then they can stand back and say, “Our review was improvidently granted, and we declined to render a decision here.” And a number of justices were signaling their interest in taking that approach.
Miller: I was confused, and I guess I remain confused. If the avenue that the justices might find for saying, “luckily, we don’t need to get our hands dirty with this. We can just say no, for very proper reasons, this can be handled at the state level.”
I remain unclear if that’s because of a long-standing necessity defense in Oregon law, or because of the way that Oregon lawmakers amended state statute, just in 2021, in response to the Martin v Boise decision. That’s a relatively short, new statute and it says this, “Any city or county law that regulates the acts of sitting, lying, sleeping or keeping warm and dry outdoors on public property that is open to the public must be objectively reasonable as to time, place and manner with regards to persons experiencing homelessness.”
So, is the idea that this new statute could give justices a way to say, “You know what, for this Oregon-based case, we don’t need to intervene because the legislature has already fixed it.”
Rankin: It could. What’s interesting about that is that, under the law already, even if they uphold Johnson, it is still the law. It is still the case that any jurisdiction in the Ninth Circuit can use reasonable time, place and manner restrictions to deal with homelessness. And so, while that’s been codified into statute, it’s currently the law across the Ninth Circuit, because that’s an explicit case that the Martin v Boise case said is okay. They said, “Look, we’re not saying that cities can’t use reasonable time, place and manner restrictions.”
So even if they step back, essentially what they would be doing is not just saying that the Oregon statute, the necessity defense which codifies Martin, is the law. They would be reinforcing that Martin is the law, because Martin already allows reasonable time, place and manner restrictions. The difference in Grants Pass is that they had a city-wide prohibition. They criminalized sleeping across the state…
Miller: Across the city.
Rankin: … criminalized across the city. I keep switching between the Oregon statute and the Grants Pass ordinance. So, what’s at issue in Johnson is saying there are zero locations where someone ‒ even if they lack a reasonable alternative ‒ there are zero locations right now in Grants Pass where it’s legal for someone to sleep outside. And that is the definition of homelessness, is sleeping outside when you lack a safe and legal place to live.
So that’s really the issue is whether you can have a 24/7 city-wide ban. The law of the land currently allows cities to impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions just like the Oregon statute codified.
Miller: What most stood out to you today, and if you had to make a bet right now, what are you expecting the court to release in late June?
Rankin: Any good lawyer will always decline an invitation to bet. I will say that you could see some ideological line breakdowns between some of the conservative and more moderate, or progressive justices. I think you’ll see some close alliances between Sotomayor and Kagan, probably Jackson, and then you’ll see some close alliances between Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh.
It’s hard for me to differentiate who was always talking, but I think I heard some more probing questions than I probably would have expected from Barrett. That sort of surprised me. But I think that that to me the biggest takeaway from the case that I didn’t necessarily expect was how clearly the court was telegraphing that they would really like to avoid rendering a decision in this case. That they feel that these messy policy decisions are for city legislatures to deal with ‒ city and state legislatures to deal with ‒ not the place for the court to be making messy policy decisions and that’s consistent with our checks and balances.
Miller: Sarah Rankin, thanks very much.
Rankin: Thank you.
Miller: Sarah Rankin is an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law, director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project. She joined us to talk about and listen to some of the oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court today as the high court took up the homelessness case out of Grants Pass.
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