Liminality and Law: Interrogating Jurisprudence Across the Liminal Life Cycle

Modern legal systems rely on bounded categories and rigid definitions to organise doctrine, allocate rights and responsibilities, and maintain social order by setting out the limits of permissible behaviours. Such definitions are the source of a subject’s legal status, but they do not always map cleanly onto the practical realities faced by those they govern. While we accept a degree of pragmatism and arbitrariness as a fair price to pay for operational efficiency, too strict a commitment to legal boundedness risks mischaracterising lived experiences, particularly where the objects of regulation sit between settled categories, or transition from one legal status to another. Viewing law and society through the lens of autopoietic systems theory, this thesis argues that divergences between law and social reality are inevitable; both are social systems which abstract information using wholly internal terms of reference, so will imbue the same inputs with different meaning. The question of this research, therefore, is how to reduce the dissonance within a category-based approach to law.

The proposed response is to use liminality, an anthropological account of threshold states, as a legal analytic. This thesis argues that liminality makes three valuable contributions to legal thinking: it identifies marginal cases where law fails to reflect lived reality; it enables a reconceptualization of legal understandings of the self that places process, multiplicity, and propensity for change at the heart of legal design; and it grounds a normative claim that law should guide liminal subjects through their transitions towards a stable legal status which better reflects their self-understanding, thereby promoting legal certainty without abandoning categorisation.

The thesis tests this theory by applying a framework for legal liminality to a series of case studies during moments of transition across the life cycle. In doing so, it assess how well existing legal frameworks embrace liminality, or how they might be improved if they better did so. The project’s original contributions are thus expansionist (applying liminality to new legal questions), analytical (designing and utilising a novel framework for legal liminality), and normative (arguing how law might be reformed or reconceptualised to better resolve uncertainties experienced by liminal entities).