Supreme Court cites UCLA Law faculty members in key homelessness decision
An amicus brief that UCLA School of Law’s Sunita Patel and Jeanne Nishimoto prepared and submitted to the Supreme Court was quoted by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her opinion in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a pivotal homelessness decision that the Court delivered in June.
The case involved an ordinance that restricted public camping in an Oregon city, negatively impacting many unhoused people. In a 6-3 decision, the court held that the ordinance does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. In her opinion, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, she quoted a friend-of-the-court brief that Patel and Nishimoto – who run UCLA Law’s Veterans Legal Clinic – wrote and filed in partnership with the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and forty three other veterans’ service providers. Students Gabriel Henriquez ’25 and Atreyi Mitra ’24 contributed to the brief.
In her opinion, Justice Sotomayor stated that veterans are “at an increased risk of homelessness,” and she cited Patel and Nishimoto’s brief, which detailed the lived experiences of several homeless veterans. “Consider Erin Spencer,” Sotomayor wrote, “a disabled Marine Corps veteran who stores items he uses to make a living, such as tools and bike parts, in a cart. He was arrested repeatedly for illegal lodging. Each time, his cart and belongings were gone once he returned to the sidewalk. ‘[T]he massive number of times the City or State has taken all I possess leaves me in a vacuous déjà vu.’”
The Veterans Legal Clinic provides legal assistance to veterans, caregivers and families who access services at the West Los Angeles V.A. campus. Patel is the clinic’s faculty director and a professor in the law school. Nishimoto is the clinic’s executive director.