Inimai Chettiar

Inimai M. Chettiar is the Director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The Justice Program seeks to secure our nations promise of "equal justice for all" by creating a rational and fair legal system. It proposes and works to enact data-driven policy and legal reforms aimed at ending unnecessary incarceration and closing the justice gap for low-income Americans.Ms. Chettiar focuses on using economics and cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate that helping struggling communities can help the entire country achieve prosperity. She advocates that government should make policy choices based the economic and societal costs and benefits they produce. She received this training at NYU Law Schools Institute for Policy Integrity, where she led legal projects that used cost-benefit analysis to reform a variety of federal laws. Most recently, Ms. Chettiar applied these practices to help create and coordinate the American Civil Liberties Unions nationwide state legislative Initiative to End Overincarceration. In 2011, she was selected by the Center for American Progress as a fellow for her groundbreaking leadership on the intersection of race and economics. Her reform efforts and publications have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, MSNBC.com, NPR, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Guardian, Forbes, and other outlets. She has published extensively on economic policy, criminal law reform, and racial inequalities.