The Supreme Court upheld laws that single out homeless people for punishment in Friday’s Grants Pass v. Johnson, a 6–3 decision with all three liberals in dissent. On Saturday’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discuss the decision with Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan, who served in the Biden administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. A portion of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Because the Supreme Court is flooding the zone with major decisions, Grants Pass is likely to get lost, and that’s by design. But it seems incredibly important. While billionaires and oligarchs are scoring huge victories at this court, you know who lost big time? People just trying to sleep.

Mark Joseph Stern: No way around it—this is a horrible decision for homeless people, especially those who are disabled. For several years the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has held that it’s cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to punish an individual for sleeping outside when they have nowhere else to go because there’s no available shelter. That, the appeals court held, is punishing people for the status of being homeless, rather than any particular kind of conduct. There’s a lot of misinformation out there that blames the West’s homelessness crisis on the 9th Circuit’s decisions, but frankly, these cases mostly tinker around the edges of the problem. They allowed the government to ban encampments, individual tents, public urination, and similar problems; the one rule was that it couldn’t criminalize actual homelessness by punishing people for sleep, a biological necessity.

Anyway, Grants Pass is a town in Oregon that launched a crusade to drive out its homeless population. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent shows pretty conclusively that lawmakers decided to target these individuals through a stringent ban that made it a crime to sleep outside, even when........

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