Opening remarks.

• Author: Allen, Ronald J.
• Position: Centennial Symposium: A Century of Criminal Justice

It is a great honor to be asked to make some opening remarks at this centennial celebration of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (JCLC). On behalf of the Journal, I extend our greetings to all the distinguished participants and our thanks for coming. On behalf of the participants, I extend our thanks and admiration to the Journal's Editorial Board, which has worked tirelessly to put this interesting conference together. To set the tone for the rest of the day, I was asked to give a bit of the history of the Journal, to highlight the important developments of the last century, to make predictions about the future, and to talk a little about one of my favorite topics, theorizing about theory--all in the remaining twenty-five minutes allocated for these remarks--and so I best move directly to the task.

1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE JOURNAL

   In one sense, JCLC began as an outgrowth of the National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology held at the school in June 1909 to celebrate the law school's fiftieth anniversary. That Conference in turn was a result of Roscoe Pound's famous address presented at the annual convention of the American Bar Association in 1906, "The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice." Building upon his address and its impact, Pound was the primary organizer of the 1909 Conference. The purpose of the Conference was to bring together scholars of both criminal law and criminology, practitioners, jurists, and public officials to set out a plan for criminal justice reform, and it was the first national conference in those fields. The participants comprised an astonishing collection of talent, largely selected by the supreme courts and governors of the various states, and it had equally astonishing results. Some of the highlights include:

   * At the close of the conference, delegates voted into existence the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, the first of its kind in the United States.

   * The conference led directly to the first forensics lab. There was some work done in the field of police science after 1909 conference. This led in 1929 to the establishment of a police laboratory by Colonel Calvin Goddard that was affiliated with the Northwestern School of Law. The next year, the American Journal of Police Science was created, which in 1932 became a section of the Journal, and the name was changed to the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology. and Police Science.

   * The concern for practical legal education expressed during the 1909 conference led to the creation of legal clinics in law schools.

   * Most pertinent to today's conference, the conference participants called for the creation of a journal by the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, which would become the first English-language periodical "devoted to the scientific study of the criminal law and criminology." And it remained the only journal for a considerable period of time during which the Journal almost singlehandedly kept alive criminology in the United States. It was not until the decade of the 1960s when federal money began pouring into research into "causes of crimes" and related topics that the field built upon the foundations created by the Institute and the Journal.

   Here are some interesting facts about the Journal:

   * It had the same Editor-in-Chief for fifty years, Robert H. Gault, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, and finally transitioned to a fully student-run publication in 1971 (the sixty-second volume). However, the Journal retains a professional board of criminologists to oversee the criminology articles it publishes.

   * The Journal published its first female author in its second volume 1911.

   * Notable authors, in addition to essentially every single productive scholar in the fields of...