False imprisonment
illegal restraint of a person in a bounded area without justification or consent
False imprisonment or unlawful imprisonment occurs when a person intentionally restricts another person's movement within any area without legal authority, justification, or the restrained person's permission.
Actual physical restraint is not necessary for false imprisonment to occur. A false imprisonment claim may be made based upon private acts, or upon wrongful governmental detention.
For detention by the police, proof of false imprisonment provides a basis to obtain a writ of habeas corpus.
Under common law, false imprisonment is both a crime and a tort.
Imprisonment
Within the context of false imprisonment, an imprisonment occurs when a person is restrained from moving from a location or bounded area, as a result of a wrongful intentional act, such as the use of force, threat, coercion, or abuse of authority.
Detention that is not false imprisonment
Not all acts of involuntary detention amount to false imprisonment. For example, an accidental detention will not support a claim of false imprisonment since false imprisonment requires an intentional act. The law may privilege a person to detain somebody else against their will. A legally authorised detention does not constitute false imprisonment.
The public source identifies “False imprisonment” as illegal restraint of a person in a bounded area without justification or consent. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around False, imprisonment and illegal.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q694752. The Library of Congress control number is sh85064675. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “False imprisonment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.