Judge Foughty leads national racial and ethnic fairness conference Monday, May 22, 2023

From May 21-24, Northeast Judicial District Presiding Judge Donovan Foughty will be heading the 35th annual conference of the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts.

Judge Foughty is the current president and moderator of the consortium. He has been a member since 2007.

In his opening remarks to the conference, Judge Foughty said over the years he "fell in love with the work that the consortium was doing, working for a more just society."

The consortium was formed in 1989. Its mission is to eliminate racial and ethnic bias in local judicial systems. It works to encourage courts to create task forces, commissions, and other advisory bodies to examine the treatment and experience of communities of color in the courts and to find remedies and solutions to existing barriers to justice through the courts.

North Dakota has its own Minority Justice Implementation Committee chaired by Judge Anthony Benson and the Tribal and State Court Affairs Committee chaired by Justice Jerod Tufte.

A principal element of the consortium’s annual conference is to study the legal failures of the past. Past conferences have examined the failure of the judicial system in Nazi Germany and the breakup of Native American families during the boarding school era. This year's conference will be looking into the incarceration of U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage during World War II.

Read more about the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts:   https://www.national-consortium.org/