Restricting Movement or Depriving Liberty?

Abstract

This judicial appeal for clarity exposes a jurisprudential problem which threatens one of our most fundamental human values; the right to liberty. For no-one really knows what it means to be “deprived” of one’s “liberty”. The extremities are straightforward. Prisoners are deprived; picnickers are not. But liberty deprivations may “take numerous other forms [whose] variety is being increased by developments in legal standards and in attitudes”. Technology, too, has played its part in such developments by introducing novel ways of restricting movement beyond the paradigmatic lock and key. The more expansive those other forms, however, the greater the risk of legal uncertainty.