Inaugural Annual Criminal Law Lecture - Taking Victims Seriously: Abolitionism, Minimalism and Punishment as Equality Affirming
On 20 October 2026, the Law School will host its Inaugural Annual Criminal Law Lecture.
To attend the lecture, please register using the “Register Here” button.
We are delighted to announce that Professor Ekow Yankah of the University of Michigan will deliver this year’s lecture, entitled:
“Taking Victims Seriously: Abolitionism, Minimalism and Punishment as Equality Affirming”
Abstract: A generation of justified criticism of the American criminal punishment system has culminated in the unprecedented political and academic rise of the penal abolitionist movement. The abolitionist critique fundamentally indicts prisons as an instrument in national (perhaps global) racial, class and capitalist domination not merely to be curtailed but eliminated. In its strongest form, abolitionism seems skeptical of any punishment. But even more powerful than the individual prongs, abolitionism is tied together by an ethos which views state punishment as always regrettable, shameful or tragic.
Despite powerful arguments by abolitionists, this piece argues that the strongest abolitionist claim that we are never justified in imposing incarceration misses important positive reasons we have to punish. Under reasonably just conditions, punishment expresses a collective response to certain kinds of wrongdoings – public wrongdoings – that undermine our ability to live as civic equals. Incarceration should always be recognized as grave; its moral weight never dismissed. But there are times when we should punish, with regret but without shame. Punishment is a way we forcibly reject certain wrongful acts by socially understood expressive sanctions. Sufficiently serious wrongful harms are appropriately met by sufficiently serious sanctions for the offender. Serious punishment, including incarceration, is one of the ways we make clear to victims and the public that we take their being wronged seriously. Criminal punishment serves a distinctively political justification, counterintuitively, securing equality in our civic lives.
We warmly invite students, staff, academics, and members of the wider legal community to join us for what promises to be a stimulating and thought-provoking event.
A drinks reception will follow this event.
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