A legal reform is a comprehensive review and proposal of laws with the aim of making them fairer or more effective. It often involves addressing systemic injustices, like racial bias in the criminal justice system or overly harsh sentencing. Emerging issues, such as data privacy concerns, may also prompt legal reforms.
Reforms to improve access to justice can be transformative. However, as with other types of law reform, their success depends on complementary changes to regulations, public awareness raising targeted to men and women, and other activities that help to create more just official and informal legal systems.
In addition, to create more just legal systems it’s important to challenge society’s foundational narratives about crime and punishment. These narratives shape the ways that people understand and define their reality and influence the legitimacy of different systems of law and justice.
This is a challenging task because legal reform efforts often fail to take into account how narratives and perceptions of justice are shaped by cultural contexts and norms that vary widely.
This article will examine why these dynamics make it so difficult to advance and implement law reforms and how we can break free from them. The article begins where most opportunities for the advancement and (more frequently) retreat of legal reforms begin: with political processes that are often ignored by analysts. It then goes on to explore the complex way that a law reform process actually works. Once a Work Group has determined that a particular area of laws should be reformed, they begin carefully developing proposed legislation, discussing each section and arguing about how it should be worded.