Joint Publication: Racial Inequality in the Legal System Locally and Nationally
A note from JLI Vol. 39 Editor-in-Chief Navin Ramalingam:
This special joint online issue, Racial Inequality in the Legal System Locally and Nationally, is a collaborative work among the six student-run legal academic journals across the three law schools in the state of Minnesota. The objective of the collaboration is to use our platforms and collective effort to work with scholars to publish cutting-edge, timely, and thought-provoking articles addressing social justice issues including racial inequality and policing both at home in Minnesota and in the nation-at-large. We are proud to present our joint publication that has been over a year in the making. This joint venture would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of the staff members and editors across our six journals who went above and beyond and worked selflessly to bring this publication to fruition.
The Minnesota Journal of Law and Inequality (JLI) has published three articles in the special issue. In the first article, Ramsey County Public Defender Greg Egan takes an empirical look at second-degree felony murder convictions sentenced from 2012 through 2018 in Hennepin and Ramsey counties to detail the racial inequities in Minnesota’s felony-murder doctrine. In the second article, Professor David Schultz conducts a methodological exploration of what it would take to reform the institution of policing in the United States. In the third article, JLI editors trace the history of policing in the United States since its colonial days, outline the decades of failure to achieve meaningful progress in Minneapolis, and advocate for the redirection of MPD funding to violence prevention and alternative responses.