Emma Pettit
speaker
457 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 3d ago
Emma Pettit’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It reaches the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And in 2018, in a decision that would end up having some major repercussions, the judges, they agree with the homeless people, not with the city.
This is Kevin Cope.
He's a law professor at the University of Virginia.
And I talked to Kevin about this case because he and two other legal scholars, they wrote this paper arguing that even though the court described its decision as narrow, like in theory, it was only going to apply when there aren't enough shelter beds in any given town, that narrowness, that's not really how cities treated it.
After this ruling, many cities on the West Coast and even in some other parts of the country, they really just pull back on the enforcement of laws that ban people from sleeping in public.
And largely as a result, according to Kevin, encampments, they explode.
Yeah, it's like this logistical wormhole that opens up because it's like, okay, available shelter bed is a bed that's in a Christian shelter that has some religious requirements available to someone who maybe they're an atheist, maybe they're Jewish, maybe they're Muslim.
Like, what does available really mean?
Yeah.
And also, a lot of these cities, they're liberal.
And maybe more important than all of that is these cities, they do not want to get sued.
And they had good reason to be.
Like advocates and legal aid organizations, they file a wave of lawsuits in the aftermath of this case, Martin v. City of Boise, that are trying to hold cities to this new standard of
Yeah.
So you might not be reading, like, court documents for the latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit, but you notice if you stop getting ticketed and arrested, right?
Like, you notice if you're interacting with the police less.
You notice when the enforcement in your area changes.
You're actually, like, pretty attuned to that.
And Kevin and some of his colleagues, they note that a lot of homeless people, they don't like living in shelters.
Showing 421–440 of 457 · page 22 of 23
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