Ok let me just spitball here. "Outlaw" is not a homogenous category. It's sometimes a legislative category with defined parameters, but those parameters are not the same throughout all times and in all countries, and even within a particular time and place it's not always clear. I honestly don't know enough to say anything worth saying about outlawry as it ever existed in a real-world legal context. But I do know that as it is constructed imaginatively in fiction and fictionalized narratives, "outlaw" is a category of person outside the law's protection.
Robin Hood is an outlaw. That's not the same as saying he's a criminal. He's an outlaw in that he is formally outside the protection of the law. It's therefore licit, and even encouraged, for ordinary citizens to fight, apprehend, imprison, or kill him. We see this conception of outlawry at play, I think, in medieval werewolf stories as well. Outlaws are sometimes described as being given a wolf's head. I'd need to look this up, because I'm regurgitating a vague memory of a thing.
But in any case, in the European medieval imagination wolves are frequently constructed as the enemies of human civilization. Outlaws become wolves in the eyes of the law--to attack and kill one is good and right because it protects the community they're a threat to.
So Robin Hood is kind of a werewolf, and werewolves are kind of outlaws--they both become wolves sometimes. And most medieval werewolves--every literary one I can think of--are mostly sympathetic figures. We're usually rooting for them to regain their humanity. So, too, as an imaginative category outlaws are sympathetic. Robin Hood and his men are frequently brutally violent in the medieval stories, but we're still more on their side than against them.
And YET their enemies are just as likely to be ordinary people as they are to be the stock villains we think of now. So there's an ongoing tension between imagining outlaws as unjustly persecuted, as justly and rightly feared, and as admirably free. Even within the same text.
Readers are encouraged to admire Robin Hood and also fear him and also root for him and also envy him and also kind of hope he gets what's coming to him. And again it's really striking me as I write this how similar that is to how we imagine the werewolves Bisclavret or Melion. Outlaws are fundamentally outside the law and society. That's where they belong. And one of the conservative functions of stories about outlaws like Robin Hood is to tell us that they're really better off that way. They're happier as outlaws.
The construction of outlawry also creates the boundaries that define the lawful community by contrast. The way that we can know that we're really under the protection of the realm is that there are people who aren't, who we can compare ourselves to.
So then in the 21st century we have the concept of "Illegals." Conservative politicians and pundits especially talk about "illegal immigrants" or sometimes "illegal aliens". And of course the pushback on that is that no person is illegal. Which is an important pushback.
The phrase "illegal immigrant" is meant partly to obfuscate what "no human is illegal" objects to--that is, it suggests that the immigration is illegal rather than the person.
But then immigration advocates and human rights activists continue to say "no human is illegal" because the truth both sides implicitly recognize is that "illegal immigrant" IS a claim for the illegality of a person. No human is illegal because ACTIONS, not persons are illegal but we don't see the same kind of wide-scale pushback on the term "criminal" to refer to a person. Maybe there is that pushback, but if so it isn't as mainstream yet. Maybe it should be. But perhaps "illegal" to refer to a person is really an updated version of "outlaw."
Not outlaw in the Wild West sense of career criminal, but in the sense of person outside the protection of the law.
And again, communities define themselves by their boundaries, so knowing that outlaws exist--that it's possible to be outside the protection of the law--helps us define what the law's protection even is.
So while right-wing movement in the States to deny citizenship to "illegals" is a racially motivated attempt to draw clear lines around citizenship, it's also an attempt to define who is within the mandate of the protection of the law.
And most left-wing attempts to give citizenship to "illegal immigrants" are an attempt to draw that boundary line in a different place while still maintaining it. Rather than defining outlawry or illegality out of existence entirely, they often want to redraw the boundary lines.
So are there 21st century American narratives about "illegal" people who don't want to become citizens, or for whom the liminality of their position gives them freedom? I can't actually think of any, though that's what I would expect to see if my framing here has merit.
By the way, I'm not an expert on outlaw narratives, but Dr. Mikayla Hunter, who teaches the Robin Hood Course at Clockworks Academy is! Sign up for the course and get tons of smart insights into medieval outlawry!
Oh and if my comments about werewolves piqued your curiosity, I have much more to say about that in the Werewolves Course!