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13 St. Louis U. L.J. 351 (1968-1969)
Law Reform in Historical Perspective

handle is hein.journals/stlulj13 and id is 369 raw text is: LAW REFORM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN* REFORM AND CHANGE: AN EQUivALENCY The phrase, law reform, has no exact, objective meaning. When one uses it, one is, first of all, referring to some program for changing the law. The word reform implies that the change is for the better; but everyone who proposes change thinks his proposals are good ones. Yet not all programs of planned legal change are popularly referred to as reform. The Social Security Act was the product of long struggle for deliberate legal change; hardly anyone would call it law reform. In common speech, the phrase law reform is typi- cally applied to one of two kinds of legal change. Reform may con- sist of a more or less general revision of the laws, or of some branch of law, in the direction of consistency or systematic arrangement. This is reform through codification, which has been (in the words of Hessel Yntema) a cardinal vehicle of reform during the last cen- tury of legal history.' General codification has not had a happy time in the United States; but codification on a smaller scale has become epidemic. Recently, the triumph of the Uniform Commercial Code has given new vigor to this movement. The second use of the phrase refers to procedural improvement-change in the housekeep- ing aspects of justice. Law reform means the abolition of forms of action, the adoption of better kinds of pleading, getting rid of clutter in our dockets. In short, both in the mouths of laymen and lawyers law reform has not necessarily stood for so grand a program as the word reform may seem to promise. Throughout most of its range of meaning, it has referred to what one might call, for now, lawyers' law-to matters of primary concern to the legal profession: the union of law and equity; centralization of state court systems, codifi- cation of the law of bulk sales; abolition by statute of the rule in Shelley's case; a Uniform Simultaneous Death Act. Exceptions, such as the Uniform Commercial Code and general codification are, as we shall see, only apparent exceptions. In law as in politics, re- form is not revolution. Changes in the very marrow of American law do not somehow achieve the title of law reform. The rise of the welfare state; the growth of a staggering array of land use controls; regulation of business; the mushrooming growth of the tax laws- none of these are conventionally part of the century or more of re- form. $ Professor of Law, Stanford School of Law. 1. Yntema, The Jurisprudence of Codification, in FIELD CENTENARY ESSAYS 251 (Reppy ed. 1949).

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