Legal reform is the process of examining laws and regulations to see how they are working, how they can be improved, and implementing those changes. This includes analyzing existing laws to determine their effectiveness and fairness, advocating for and implementing changes in the law, and conducting research on legal topics and systems.
Legal change can occur as a result of many factors, and the precise impact of any given change is often difficult to predict. In the long run, a particular society’s cultural norms and structures will usually shape and bend any external forces to some degree. A war, a plague, an industrial accident, or even a social movement like democratization or sexual permissiveness may nudge a society along certain paths.
The Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre (ACRC) conducts scholarly research on contemporary issues of concern to the people of Alberta, Canada. Its projects are diverse and include proposals for legislation, reports on citizen complaints about police behaviour, and manuals for lawyers who represent mentally disabled clients.
The ACRC is a member of the International Association for the Advancement of Legal Reform. The ILR supports research and education in the fields of civil rights, commercial law, constitutional law, intellectual property law, and privacy law, and works with local, state, national, and international organizations to bring about meaningful legal reform. This work includes repairing our broken class action lawsuit system; curbing the proliferation of frivolous claims by trial lawyers, and fighting back against the multibillion Third Party Litigation Funding industry here and globally.
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