04.11.24 —Professor Martha Davis, an internationally recognized expert on economic and social rights, has joined with a group of leading law professors to submit an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Gloria Johnson, a case that will determine whether, under the U.S. Constitution, a local government can make it a crime to involuntarily live outside and unsheltered when adequate shelter is not available. The Supreme Court will review the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which followed precedent in the Ninth Circuit and elsewhere that states are not allowed to make it a crime to sleep outside if no inside space is available.
“The brief debunks the city’s assertion that contemporary efforts to criminalize homelessness find support in U.S. historic practice of vagrancy laws,” said Davis, who serves as faculty co-director of Northeastern Law’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy and is the author of several books related to human rights, including Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West, 3d ed. 2023). “And if such practices were part of our history, it would underscore the reasons that our constitutional law should evolve, and not be bound to repeat the cruel mistakes of the past,” she added.
Davis was joined in submitting the brief by professors William P. Quigley, Jeffrey Adler, Erwin Chemerinsky, Helen Hershkoff, Stephen Loffredo, Nantiya Ruan and Laurence H. Tribe. Carmen Inguina Gonzales of the Howard Law School Civil Rights Clinic served as Counsel of Record.
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