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to demand higher than normal wages.28 King Edward III responded
by passing the Statute of Labourers 1351, a largely economic measure
that fixed wages and limited the ability of people to travel and seek
higher pay.29
During the centuries that followed, laws that criminalized
vagrancy were enforced against homeless people, the indigent, and
other marginalized groups as a means of social control. The hallmarks
of vagrancy statutes were that they were vague, accorded sweeping
police discretion, and were disproportionately enforced against vul-
nerable individuals and groups.30 Although vagrancy laws emerged
following a public health crisis, public health justifications for regulat-
ing homeless people persisted after the Black Plague resolved. Even
centuries later, many construed homelessness as a form of social mal-
ady and drew connections between homelessness, disease, and filth—
depictions that underpinned law enforcement policies and were
employed to justify homeless people’s exclusion from public spaces.31
If vagrancy statutes seem like some irrelevant relic of the past,
they are not. One of the most important U.S. constitutional decisions
that governs procedural due process arose from a successful constitu-
tional challenge to a vagrancy statute—a decision that served to subse-
quently invalidate loitering laws that were enforced against minority
communities.32 In England and Wales, the Vagrancy Act still prohibits
sleeping on public property and panhandling.33 Canada’s Criminal
Code prohibited the crime of vagrancy until 2019. Once vagrancy laws
were struck down as unconstitutional in the U.S. as being void for
vagueness and in Canada for overbreadth, cities responded by draft-
ing more narrowly tailored and precise quality-of-life laws, which
the police still enforce.34 Today, quality-of-life offences continue to
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Deborah Livingston, “Police Discretion and the Quality of Life in Public Places:
Courts, Communities, and the New Policing” (1997) 97:3 Colum L Rev 551 at
584-85.
31. See for example Sir George Nicolls, Thomas Mackay & HG Wilink, A History of
the English Poor Law in Connection with the State of the Country and the Condition of
the People (London: King & Son, 1904) at 22, 248, 377; Ronald Amster, “Patterns
of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness” (2003) 30:1 Social
Justice 195 at 198.
32. Papachristou v Jacksonville, 405 US 156 (1972). See also: Chicago v Morales, (1999)
527 US 41 at 53-54; Kolender v Lawson, (1983) 461 US 352 at 357-58.
33. The Vagrancy Act 1824 (UK), 5 Geo IV, c 83, ss 3-4.
34. Rita Goluboff, “Dispatch from the Supreme Court Archives: Vagrancy, Abortion,
VULNERABLE
The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Title
- VULNERABLE
- Subtitle
- The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19
- Authors
- Vanessa MacDonnell
- Jane Philpott
- Sophie Thériault
- Sridhar Venkatapuram
- Publisher
- Ottawa Press
- Date
- 2020
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- ISBN
- 9780776636429
- Size
- 15.2 x 22.8 cm
- Pages
- 648
- Categories
- Coronavirus
- International