The Introduction opens with an attempt to explain the rift that has developed between German history and German-Jewish history since the early attempts at writing academic history, during the early nineteenth century. This happened despite the fact that the two historiographies developed in parallel from the beginning, chronologically and methodically, and continued to exist well into the post-Second World War years, both in Germany and elsewhere. Social history in Germany and in the United States was eventually crucial for changing this paradigm, and the post-modern turn increased our interest in the history of minorities. Finally, gender history helped not only in adding previously neglected sectors of society into the grand narrative, but also in changing this narrative altogether. Now it could be seen from different perspectives, and in our case it is indeed being seen through Jewish eyes.

Chapter 6 examines the limits of legal legibility, or what – and whose – problems are legible to the law, and who gets left behind. The chapter looks to the community called Agua Blanca in the western part of Colombia. There, the most visible impact of the 1991 Constitution seems to be the conversion of rights promises into paperwork. While residents of Agua Blanca still use the tutela procedure, accepting the idea that filing tutela claims as what one has to do to try to gain access to services, they see the 1991 Constitution as largely irrelevant to their lives, which are instead constrained by violence and marginality.

Chapter 7 explores voices at the margin of society in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. To the extent this novel on seafaring is autobiographical, it also explores Conrad himself as a marginal subject. The novel is one of the most sympathetic portrayals of a class of people frequently considered to be marginal: a multinational group of physical laborers paid a meager wage, living in harsh and deadly conditions, executing their menial jobs heroically (with notable exceptions). To move from the margin to the center, take up the pen and write a compelling story about this life for the middle-class literary establishment – first published in the conservative W. E. Henley’s The New Review in 1897 – is the part of Conrad’s achievement I focus on in this chapter. The chapter explores how Conrad makes his readers listen to the voice of the sailors, reflect on the value of their work, and appreciate the importance of seemingly menial, physical labor – like the heroism of serving coffee, which the novel discusses.

Women played an important part in the Irish Revival, only to discover their contributions were not always welcome, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, in the new dispensation they had helped to create. While modernist writing was a marginal presence on the Irish scene, women writers – with some notable, if partial exceptions (Blanaid Salkeld) – were a subset of this subset. One form in which women poets continued to work prolifically was the ballad, as in the work of Temple Lane, which takes refuge in suburban spaces from the schematic backdrops of rural and urban settings alike. For another writer in a similar vein, Kathleen Arnold Price, marginality meant avoiding publication in volume form, while Sheila Wingfield cultivated a performative distance from themes of hearth and home celebrated in her clipped lyrics. Critically at odds with both their Revivalist inheritance and modernist alternatives, Irish women poets of this period carved out a space of their own as modern traditionalists.

This chapter synthesises the broad picture that emerges from Irish constitutional proeprty law about the mediation of property rights and social justice, and about the impact of progressively framed constitutional property guarantees on that mediation. It highlights the rewards for progressive property theory of doctrinal analysis and a wider comparative lens. Most fundamentally, it emphasises the political nature of constitutional property law in two ways. FIrst, judges gravitate away from innovative interpretation and application of ideas like social justice towards deference to the determinations of the elected branches of government. Second, constitutional property law can have political, and wider cultural effects, that do not reflect the strict legal effect of constitutional property rights as reflected in doctrine. It concludes that Irish constitutional property law demonstrates the challenges of implementing progressive property ideas in legal doctrine, but at the same time provides an illuminating example of a broadly coherent and effective attempt to implement a progressive constitutional structure for achieving partial resolutions of the tension betwene property rights and social justice.