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When the First National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology drew to a close, its delegates resolved to establish the first English-language periodical "devoted to the scientific study of the criminal law and criminology."1 Only months later - and exactly one century ago - the seminal pages of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Journal) were published. This, the hundredth volume of the Journal, is committed to honoring the Journal's history and, more generally, the past one hundred years of criminal law and criminology.
As Jennifer Devroye recounts in her article, The Rise and Fall of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, the organizers of the National Conference, particularly then-Dean of Northwestern Law, John H. Wigmore, hoped to modernize criminal law.2 To that end, Dean Wigmore, prominent legal and sociological scholars, practicing lawyers, jurists, and government officials joined together in June 1909 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Northwestern University School of Law and created a plan for criminal justice reform.3 Over the course of two short days, delegates discussed topics including sentencing and prison reform, wrongful arrests, unlawful police interrogations, the constitutional rights of the accused, trial procedure, and, significantly, the promotion of the systematic study of criminal behavior and the criminal justice system.4 In May 1910, the final item on this list came to fruition when the Journal published its first issue.
Those early pages of the Journal, like the National Conference itself, focused wholeheartedly on criminal justice reform. In the article "A Plan for the Reorganization of Criminal Statistics in the United States," for instance, Louis N. Robinson criticized the state-based method of collecting crime statistics as inefficient and incomplete and recommended a supplementary federal system.5 Edward Lindsey likewise condemned a bill before Congress that would have created a criminology laboratory within the Department of Justice.6 And a third article, "Technicalities in Procedure, Civil and Criminal," focused on the need to simplify the federal and state court systems.7
The Journal published five more issues in its inaugural year, and, throughout those pages, reform remained the central theme. One author called for services to aid ex-felons as they re-entered society.8 Others listed ways to improve the value and legitimacy of expert testimony in criminal cases.9 And still others proposed...