Brief of San Bernardino County, California as Amicus Curiae in Support of Petitioner in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino County, California in the Supreme Court of the United States in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson.
The case considers whether homelessness programs, including laws restricting camping on public property, run afoul of constitutional protections for the individual civil liberties of homeless residents. This amicus brief looks at the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in evaluating the constitutionality of vagrancy laws in Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962); Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968); Coates v. City of Cincinnati, 402 U.S. 611 (1971); and Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). The brief argues that a throughline connecting the vagrancy laws struck down in these cases is that that they all shared a common focus on marking people as outsiders— excluding them from acceptable society. Criticism of those earlier, unjust initiatives should not be leveraged against modern “clearance and closure with support” programs like those in San Bernardino County, which are trying desperately to bring homeless residents back into a community.