Law reform is the idea of making changes to legal law. It’s an enterprise that encompasses a range of goals and initiatives, from fixing the broken securities class action litigation system to curbing over-enforcement at state and federal levels.
It’s also about reducing the cost and complexity of civil justice, so that everyone can access quality legal help when they need it. It’s about closing the justice gap, especially for people like immigrants who face life-altering consequences if they don’t get help navigating a system stacked against them. It’s about finding the right balance between innovation and regulation.
The old law and development orthodoxy assumed that legal reform could be driven from the top down, with the idea that if you changed the legal texts, the rest of society would follow suit. But this is a dangerously simplistic vision of legal reform, and it’s time to stop treating it as a panacea.
The challenge for scholars of legal pluralism is to engage the public in dialogues that allow them to gain richer insights into their normative lives and learn to better manage their everyday interactions with a legal system that is both more just and more transparent. This is the only way to make law reform more meaningful, and the only way to ensure that it serves real needs rather than merely responding to the anxieties of the political elite. The future of the rule of law depends on it.
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