Grants Pass, Oregon has a population of about 38,000 people and, at last count, nowhere near enough shelter beds for its unhoused residents. The city’s answer to that shortfall wasn’t more beds. It was a set of ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside with so much as a blanket, and jailed repeat offenders — including people who had nowhere else to legally exist. In June 2024, the Supreme Court said that was perfectly constitutional.

The Question the Case Actually Asked

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson wasn’t about whether cities can regulate public space. Every city does that. It was about a narrower and much harder question: can a city punish someone for the involuntary status of being homeless, when that person has no access to shelter and nowhere else to go?

The Ninth Circuit, relying on its own precedent in Martin v. Boise, had said no — that punishing people for sleeping outside when there’s no available shelter amounts to punishing homelessness itself, which the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment doesn’t allow. You can’t criminalize a status. You can only criminalize conduct, and “existing in public because you have no home” isn’t the kind of voluntary conduct the criminal law is supposed to reach.

Grants Pass argued its ordinances didn’t target homeless people as a status — they banned specific conduct (camping, using a blanket while sleeping outside) that anyone could violate. The city just happened to enforce them almost exclusively against people who had no other option.

The Ruling: 6-3 for the City

Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, sided with Grants Pass. The Eighth Amendment, he wrote, regulates how governments can punish, not whether a particular law should exist in the first place — that’s a policy question for voters and elected officials, not courts. Because the ordinances applied to conduct (camping) rather than a status (being homeless), and because the punishments (fines, then short jail stays) weren’t the sort of torturous or barbaric punishment the Eighth Amendment was written to prevent, the Court found no constitutional violation.

Gorsuch framed the decision as returning power to local communities: “homelessness is complex,” he wrote, and its causes “are as varied as the human condition.” Courts, in his view, had no business dictating how cities balance public space, public health, and the humanitarian reality of people sleeping outside — that was a job for democratically accountable local governments.

Sotomayor’s Dissent: Punishing People for Something They Cannot Help

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, wrote one of the more forceful dissents of the term. Her opening line set the tone: “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.” For someone with no home and no shelter bed available, sleeping outside isn’t a choice among alternatives — it’s the only way to do something the human body cannot go without doing.

The dissent argued the majority had rewritten the status/conduct distinction beyond recognition. Under Robinson v. California, the Court had already held that a state can’t criminalize the status of drug addiction, even though addiction obviously involves conduct (using drugs). The logic of that precedent, Sotomayor argued, extends directly to homelessness: punishing someone for the unavoidable conduct that flows from an involuntary status — sleeping, when you have no home and no shelter bed — is functionally the same as punishing the status itself.

She called the ruling “unconscionable,” writing that it leaves people “with an impossible choice: stay awake or be arrested.” For a city with more homeless residents than shelter beds, that isn’t a hypothetical. It’s every night.

What Changed After the Ruling

Grants Pass didn’t just resolve one Oregon city’s ordinance. It removed the primary constitutional check that had, since Martin v. Boise in 2018, restrained cities across the Ninth Circuit — one of the country’s largest, covering California, Oregon, Washington, and much of the West — from criminalizing outdoor sleeping when shelter wasn’t available.

The effects were immediate and national in scope:

None of this made more shelter beds appear. It just made it legal to punish people for the absence of them.

The Eighth Amendment Problem Nobody Talks About

There’s a pattern worth naming here, because it recurs across this Court’s approach to structural inequality: the majority frames the case as a narrow, technical question of doctrine — is this a status or conduct? — while the dissent insists on looking at the practical reality the doctrine is supposed to govern. Grants Pass’s own city council president had said publicly that the goal of the ordinances was to make homeless people uncomfortable enough to leave town. The city wasn’t pretending its ordinances were content-neutral regulations of camping equipment. It was punishing a status and using conduct-based language to do it.

The Court had the tools to see through that framing — Robinson provided exactly the precedent to do so — and chose the more literal reading instead. That choice wasn’t compelled by the text of the Eighth Amendment. It was a choice about whose reality counts: the city’s stated intent to displace unhoused residents, or the doctrinal fiction that a camping ban is just a camping ban.

Why This Belongs in the Court Reform Conversation

Grants Pass rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Dobbs or Trump v. United States, but it belongs in that conversation. It’s a case where the Court had two readings available — one that extended a well-established precedent to a sympathetic and clearly analogous situation, and one that gutted the practical force of that precedent while leaving it nominally intact — and chose the reading that left the most vulnerable people with the fewest legal protections.

That’s not an accident of judicial philosophy. It’s a pattern. A Court that reliably finds narrow, technical reasons to rule against people with the least power to fight back in court is a Court whose “neutral” doctrine keeps producing suspiciously consistent outcomes.

Cities still have every incentive to build shelter capacity, house people, and address homelessness as the policy failure it is. Grants Pass didn’t take that option away. What it took away was the one legal backstop that existed when cities chose punishment instead — and it did so for the several hundred thousand Americans who, on any given night, have nowhere else to be.

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