Yale Law School will host the 18th Annual Liman Colloquium, “Detention on a Global Scale: Punishment and Beyond,” on April 9-10, 2015. The symposium is jointly sponsored by the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program and the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship.
This convening, the first jointly sponsored by both programs, explores the expansion of the justifications for and forms of confinement. A record number – more than 11 million – of people are in detention. In addition to the classic justification of criminal punishment and detention prior to criminal trial, governments also have categories of “civil” detainees, including the mentally ill, juveniles, migrants, and those deemed a threat to national security. Their confinement often takes forms largely indistinguishable from prisons. Critics have numerous objections on legal, practical, and moral grounds, and because the numbers in detention place immense fiscal burdens on governments, many commentators believe that opportunities now exist to revisit these practices.
