Legal reform is the process of making law and legal institutions more effective and responsive to society’s needs. This includes everything from ensuring access to justice by everyone, including the poor, to strengthening justice systems and enabling them to meet international rule of law standards.
A major social change (a war, plague, revolution, or a major innovation like antibiotics, automobiles, or computers) will almost always lead to legal reform; but the exact form it takes is never precisely predictable. This is because an outside force, movement, or situation will often clash with some other social force, movement or group that resists the change or tries to counteract it.
The most common techniques for legal reform are constitutional amendments, statutory changes and judicial interpretation. The latter may involve new interpretations of existing laws or new ways to interpret those laws.
Legal reforms also include structural modifications to legal institutions. For example, if one party in a political system is unhappy with the way a Supreme Court interprets its laws, it can increase the number of seats on the Court and fill them with judges who seem to have philosophies more in line with its own political objectives. This will likely produce a quick, short-term impact.
Finally, legal reforms can be prompted by the need to address systemic injustices. For example, a growing number of people who cannot afford counsel are arrested for minor offenses and sent to jail before their cases even get started because they can’t pay monetary bail. In response, the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform is helping to implement a system of alternatives that will provide these people with a fair shot at justice.