Whether you’re an attorney or just someone who cares about justice, legal reform matters to you. It’s how you can close the justice gap for your clients and for all of us who are left behind by a system that’s stacked against them.
But legal reform is not just about changing the law, it’s also about ensuring that those changes are implemented effectively. The aims of legal reform are many and varied: they can include bringing the law into line with current conditions, eliminating defects in the law, simplification, or the adoption of new methods for administering and dispensing justice.
A key element in this is how the law and the legal order are impacted by social interests and groups with different vested interest in the status quo. In some cases, a change in the law will have immediate effects (on some litigants or on some group) while in others, changes in the law will have more indirect consequences that ripple through society.
This is why scholars need to explore what legal and legal system reforms do for different interests. They need to study how the power of some groups to resist change can be overcome so that law and legal orders produce better outcomes.
In this article, we use a framework for institutional reform that responds to the reality that disputes about determinacy are at the heart of the interpretive clash, and that legal systems often have to be re-calibrated in a very dynamic way to deal with the needs of a society as it changes. It is a framework that focuses on reforming legal institutions in a way that affirms the rights of citizens and rebuilds trust between the public and its government.