When we think about what it is that legal scholars share in common, and whether there is any single concern that connects us all as part of a single endeavour, it is difficult to avoid concluding that marginalisation is key. Marginalisation can manifest in all manner of ways, has numerous causes, affects people from myriad backgrounds and its effects can range from the mundane all the way to the ruinous, devasting, even lethal. In law, marginalisation can have a starring role – behaviours deemed to be beyond the pale and punishable by imprisonment are explicitly marginalised in law, for example. But at the same time, the ‘margin’ can be anything that presents the ‘hard case’, whose exclusion is open to doubt and disagreement and open to debate and reversal.

But beyond these rather unhelpfully broad generalisations, what is marginalisation? What does it actually look like, and what makes it distinct from other indices of disadvantage, subordination or victimisation? In a special issue of the International Journal of Law in Context published this month (‘Marginalisation in Law, Policy and Society’), a group of legal scholars, working in a diverse set of contexts and using a variety of different methodologies, address these questions. The articles we have brought together for the special issue show us how marginalisation manifests itself, for example, in the realm of housing for the poorest people: families who struggle to access social housing, who encounter obstacles to having their voices heard even after the Grenfell Tower fire, and who must comply with exacting norms of good behaviour before they can access housing schemes. The issue explores how marginalisation flows from one’s being a ‘foreigner’ in Britain – in some instances by finding oneself subject to Britain’s infamous ‘hostile environment’ for foreign nationals and ultimately deported from the country, and in others by becoming the object of attempts to criminalise unfamiliar and suspect religious practices that are not in themselves harmful. A third focus is the ironically marginalising effects of attempts by the state to combat marginalisation: the provision of pastoral care in prisons through chaplaincy services and without making special provision for the non-religious, and programmes targeted at preventing youth offending that actually foster resentment and disengagement amongst those purportedly being helped.

The scholarship collected and presented in the issue gives a particular shape and feel to a notoriously slippery concept in ‘marginalisation’. What emerges from these articles is an idea with very real contours and a sense of urgency regarding law’s interaction (and interference) with the lives and experiences of people who occupy the outer fringes of society. The scholarship on marginalisation tackled in the issue address some of the most important issues of the day: where people live, how they live, and what is owed to them by a state that brings them within its purview and that would seek to direct their choices. 

David Gurnham is Professor of Criminal Law and Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the School of Law, University of Southampton. Read the full special issue of International Journal of Law in Context here.