Keynote Address for the 2025 University of the Pacific Law Review Symposium: The Crime Victims' Rights Movement: Historical Foundations, Modern Ascendancy, and Future Aspirations

Abstract

This article, which serves as the keynote address for the 2025 University of Pacific Law Review Symposium, explores the past, present, and future of America's crime victims' rights movement-one of the most successful social movements in modern history. 

Historically, crime victims played a central role in criminal justice processes through private prosecutions-i.e., the ability of victims to initiate or participate in criminal prosecutions. Today, while private prosecutions have been largely supplanted by public prosecutions, the victims' rights movement has successfully restored the victims' voice in criminal processes. The movement has reformed contemporary American criminal justice so that criminal processes now often include participatory rights for victims. As a result of state victims' bills of rights, along with the federal Crime Victims' Rights Act, victims play an important role in criminal cases. Because these rights for victims are participatory rights rather an entitlement to substantive case outcomes, the victims' rights movement is not a "carceral rights movement," aimed solely at securing punitive sentences. Instead, the movement focuses on giving a voice to crime victims in their own criminal cases. This laudable effort has drawn broad support across the country. Efforts to expand and amplify victims' voices in criminal proceedings are justified and likely to continue into the future.

Keywords: crime victims, Crime Victims' Rights, Crime Victims' Rights Act, criminal law, victimology, CVRA, criminal justice