What Use The Law?

It is a well-known quote, almost by now worn to the point of cliché, that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”.(1) Most people know this to be a true analysis of what the ‘liberty, equality, property and Bentham’ of the liberal order amounts to; but to see this manifest itself in practice is something to which we in the Western world have perhaps become unaccustomed. The salient point is not even so much that the pure equality before the law itself may hide considerable inequalities of class and status, but at least as much that the supposed neutrality and ‘safeguards’ of legal procedure may turn out to result in very different outcomes in similar cases. It is important to note these cases, as they don’t show impurities and imperfections in an otherwise fair system, as the liberals would have it, but show their true significance as the inevitable results of deep structural problems. Continue reading “What Use The Law?”