A discussion with co-editors and HLS Professors Randall Kennedy and Martha Minow on their newly-launched American Journal of Law and Equality (with co-editor Cass Sunstein ’78).
From the editors: “[W]e feel an urgent need to create a new forum for conversations about equality and its challenges.
How should “equality” be understood? What are its requirements and indicia? How can legal institutions advance equalitarian policy?
When are legal institutions or practices themselves causes of inequality?
How can egalitarianism be accommodated in a polity that also seeks to advance other, sometimes conflicting, commitments: freedom, individuality, wealth-creation, privacy?
What critiques, insights, proposals, and imaginings can make measurable differences in realizing the promise of equality embedded in constitutions, statutes, regulations, customs, and social movements?
It is in the spirit of these questions that we launch this new journal with the generous support of Dean John Manning and the Harvard Law School. We see our venture as an outgrowth from and supplement to work that is produced throughout legal academia: the posing and addressing of questions related to interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution, civil rights laws, policies governing the administration of criminal law, income distribution, the operation of employment and consumer markets, the management of the environment, and regulations of safety and health, tax, insurance, voting rights, and education.
Law has been a tool for some progress in realizing more equality in American institutions and life. But law itself has flaws that have compounded inequalities.
We seek to publish writings that identify those flaws and suggest alternatives that can lead us to a more equal, just, decent society.”
