How to Make Change Happen in the Courts: A Guide for Criminal Justice Reformers

This project investigates how best to design and implement lasting changes to the criminal court process through interviews with professionals involved in reforms for child and vulnerable adult witnesses in Aotearoa/NZ, Australia and England and Wales.

About the project

Adversarial courts have historically been resistant to reform, with legislative efforts to change their practice not always resulting in meaningful shifts. However, over the last several decades, courts across several jurisdictions have embraced a series of significant reforms to enhance access to justice for child and vulnerable adult witnesses and defendants.

This project investigates how those changes came about, how they were embedded in practice, and why other proposals with comparable academic or legislative support did not succeed. It uses interviews with professionals across three countries—Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and England and Wales—who were closely involved in these reforms, including judges, lawyers, police, civil servants, clinicians, and politicians. While change-making has been studied extensively in other professions, like medicine and education, this is among the first comprehensive studies of practice reform in the criminal courts.

Grant amount

$97,000 over 18 months (2024-2026)

About the project lead

Dr Emily Henderson BA-LLB(Hons) MJur(Dist) (Akld) PhD (Cambridge) is an established independent legal researcher focusing on judges’ and lawyers’ attitudes to criminal trial reform in Aotearoa and NZ and in England and Wales. She practised for many years in the Family Court and briefly as a Crown Prosecutor. She was heavily involved in various practical reform initiatives in NZ, including Communication Assistants and the Sexual Violence Courts, has taught on various judicial and Bar courses and in 2012 was the first woman and first practitioner to be awarded the NZ Law Foundation International Research Fellowship. In 2020 she unexpectedly became the first woman and first Labour MP for Whangarei, resigning before the election to return to research, giving her experience of reform as not only a practitioner and an academic but also as a legislator.