Constitutional Law

Professor Jeffrey Selbin writes a commentary piece about the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case that determines how and when cities can clear homeless camps.

“While the Supreme Court could decide to upend more than half a decade of its own Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in deciding this case, it doesn’t need to touch earlier cases in order to strike down the lower-court holdings at issue here that extend constitutional protections to homeless people on the basis of their status,” Professor Jeffrey Selbin told the Chronicle.

“What I always hear now is how, when students are upset or offended, they phrase it as, ‘I feel unsafe.’ And I think it’s so important that we separate out the campus’ duty,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinksy during a panel on campus free speech. “It’s not our role to make them safe from ideas that they don’t want to be exposed to. But that line, I think, has gotten blurred.”

“In both the Boise and Grants Pass cases, the 9th Circuit found that laws that make it a crime to sleep in public impermissibly punish the status of being homeless,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Criminal law exists to punish people who choose to break the law, not for conduct that is not a choice.”

Professor Jeffrey Selbin said the existing cases neither fully tie cities’ hands, as some politicians say, nor provide a broad right to sleep outside, as some advocates say. He defended the status quo in which cities sometimes must seek guidance from federal judges to know whether their local rules are constitutional under the Boise decision.

“The court’s decisions … could be decisive for the presidential election in a way that we never have seen before,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of U.C. Berkeley School of Law. “But also they will matter as to how the court is perceived.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School, said the Supreme Court should “take the case and resolve early and for the entire country whether Trump can be on the ballot.” 

“I do not recall ever facing a new year with such a sense of trepidation and even fear of what to expect,” writes Dean Chemerinksy. “The presidential election campaign of 2024 promises to be unlike any we have seen in American history, and it seems inevitable that the U.S. Supreme Court will play a large role. And the docket for the current term is filled with major issues about controversial matters, such as abortion, administrative law, gun rights and the First Amendment and social media.”

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky takes a look back at the most significant developments from the Supreme Court in 2023.