Queen’s Law hosts groundbreaking criminalization conference

Photo by Bernard Clark

Dean Bill Flanagan (middle) and conference co-organizers Professor Malcolm Thorburn (Queen’s) and Professor Antony Duff (Minnesota)

Professor Malcolm Thorburn launched the fall term with a North American first. He brought together leading experts in criminal law theory from across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. to consider the principles that should guide the process of criminalization. The Queen’s University Criminalization Conference ran September 7 and 8 and was co-organized by Professor Antony Duff of the University of Minnesota Law School.

The conference opened with a discussion about the nature of theft. Other presentations ran the gamut from human rights commissions to what constitutes treason.

“Criminal law theorists have become much more sophisticated in recent years in providing criteria by which to determine what should and what should not be a crime,” Thorburn says. “So these questions now have a theoretical depth that they didn’t used to have.”

“The line between criminal law and other forms of legal regulation has become thinner,” he adds. “We used to know what was a crime and what was just the violation of a regulation, but now governments regulate conduct that we think of as core moral wrongs and they use the criminal law to prohibit things we think of as pretty minor.”

With human rights an ongoing concern in the face of criminalization and the atmosphere of fear that allowed laws such as the Patriot Act, the conference proved a major draw for theorists. Attending law professors included Lindsay Farmer of the University of Glasgow, Stephen Garvey of the Cornell Law School, and Jae Lee of the Fordham Law School.

The conference was funded by Queen’s Law, the Law Foundation of Ontario, the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Jack and May Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security.

“I am really pleased that it all worked out so well,” Thorburn says. “These events are really important for putting Queen’s on the map internationally as a centre for criminal law scholarship and legal theory.”

For more pictures, see http://law.queensu.ca/events/recentConferences/criminalizationConferencePhotos.html