Professor Andrea Armstrong to Deliver 2025 Coen Lecture
The University of Colorado Law School is excited to announce that Professor Andrea Armstrong will deliver the 66th Annual John R. Coen Lecture on Thursday, September 18 from 5:30-7:30 pm in Wittemyer Courtroom. A zoom option will also be available.
Armstrong’s lecture is titled “Carceral Secrecy.” Prisons, jails, and detention centers are “closed institutions,” and conditions within these spaces are often shielded from public view and inquiry. In this lecture, Professor Armstrong will discuss the mechanisms that keep thesespaces (and the experiences of people within them) hidden, as well as the purposes that carceral secrecy serves. Register for the event
Armstrong is the Dr. Norman C. Francis Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and a. She is an expert in incarceration law and policy, bringing much-needed transparency to incarceration practices in the United States. Armstrong’s work integrates law, history,public health, and the arts in her efforts to educate broad audiences about the human costs of incarceration.She teaches in the related fields of constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, law and poverty, and race and the law.
Professor Armstrong founded,a database and website that documents and memorializes individual deaths behind bars in Louisiana and supports documentation efforts in South Carolina and Alabama. Her research has been profiled by New Yorker Magazine, cited by the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and National Public Radio, among others, and published by leading civil rights and policy law journals including the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Stanford Law & Policy Review, and University of California-Irvine.
Professor Armstrong is a graduate of Yale Law School (JD), the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (MPA), and New York University (BA). She is certified bythe U.S. Department of Justice as a Prison Rape Elimination Act auditor.
TheCoen lectureshipwas established in 1955 in memory of John Coen, a distinguished member of the Colorado bar and an able public speaker. The lectureship seeks to bring a prominent and distinguished lawyer, jurist, or scholar of law to deliver an annual lecture to Colorado Law’s students, faculty, and alumni on a legal subject of interest and benefit to the profession, preferably with some public or political aspect.