Navigating Legal Challenges Beyond the Law: Exploring Practices and Sensemaking of 'doing Nothing' Among Legally Alienated Individuals

Access to justice studies reveal that most people do not turn to the law to address their problems, a trend particularly pronounced among those living in precarious conditions. Instead of seeking formal legal solutions, many opt to 'do nothing,' a phenomenon known as legal inaction, where individuals navigate legal challenges outside conventional legal frameworks. While there is extensive literature on legal inaction, there is limited research on how and why people, in their own words, choose to handle legal issues outside these established channels. Traditionally, the literature has framed this behaviour as legal alienation.

However, our research challenges this notion by showing that marginalized communities are not merely passive or legally disengaged. Rather, they engage in a range of practices that remain unacknowledged by the official legal system, as well as by social workers and legal aid institutions—frameworks that are grounded in a Western understanding of rationality, law, and legal organization. Using a pluriversal decolonial methodology, this paper explores how people articulate and justify ‘doing nothing’ when navigating legal problems. The study leverages a natural social experiment in Vollsmose, Denmark's largest marginalized neighborhood, where 1,000 families are being rehoused. This setting provides a unique opportunity to examine diverse yet frequently overlooked legal practices.