Criminal Law Reform Now: a new reform network

Academics and other legal researchers have always played a valuable role in the reform of criminal law, both through critique of the current law as well as through advocating reform options. There is no doubt that the expertise of legal researchers can contribute to better reforms of the law, and it is a position that carries obvious attractions for the researcher as well. Particularly for those of us who focus our research on identifying unfairness and incoherence within the current system, the opportunity to contribute to the betterment of the law, to use our work to improve that system, may be one of our principal motivations. It is also an activity, increasingly, that is being supported by universities and funding bodies, not least because of the emergence and growth of ‘impact’ requirements within the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Yet the role of the lone legal researcher within the dynamics of law reform remains difficult to identify, and even more difficult to realise in practice. It is on this topic that we contribute this short paper to the SLS Special Issue of the Journal of Criminal Law, and we also take the opportunity to introduce a new national reform network, the Criminal Law Reform Now Network (CLRN Network) that we will be launching in 2017.