Legal reform is a process that involves making laws more fair and effective. This requires constructive collaborations with national actors to strengthen justice systems. This includes improving everything from courts and prosecution services to legal aid and prisons. The ILR focuses on a wide variety of legal reform issues, including repairing the broken class action lawsuit system; curbing the rise in over-enforcement by federal and state agents; addressing the fraud that permeates asbestos litigation; and promoting responsible, innovative solutions to protect consumers and businesses from predatory mortgage practices.
Whether it is caused by a massive catastrophe (war, plague or revolution) or an important innovation (cars or antibiotics), any event or situation that affects society will eventually lead to change in its law and legal system. But the exact form that this change takes is not always easy to predict. This is because most modern legal systems have developed structures and cultural facts that bend or mediate the influence of these ‘outside’ forces in specific ways.
These dynamics also play out on a much smaller scale, with the kind of technical change that is often seen as ‘law reform’ or ‘codification.’ What starts out as a technical change may end up giving a certain group in society a convenient hook or formal excuse to advance its interests. This is the critique of legal transplants that many scholars have rediscovered in recent years. The challenge is to find ways of developing legal reform strategies that are based on building upon, rather than trying to replace, a country’s deeply rooted law and legal culture.
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