Formal legal equality remains paper rights until material social equality exists

Evidence

It does not accord with the sense of the Weimar constitution for laws which are apparently a burden on an economically stronger class to be rejected in the name of justice as arbitrary. It is precisely this apparent injustice which fulfils the demand for justice that is contained within the social system of the Weimar constitution. It is precisely when equality is to be conceived of as a material value that it must be recognized that the principle of equality before the law will remain merely a right on paper until social equality creates conditions which will make it possible for the law genuinely to apply to all equally . — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between formal equality before the law and material equality — a core critical-theory conceptual pair.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that apparent injustice is what actually fulfills a constitution’s social-justice demand is a genuinely paradoxical formulation worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Whether legal aid reforms have achieved equal justice remains genuinely disputed. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1198; Longstanding antiblack socialization persists despite formal legal equality; Formal legal equality masks substantive inequality between rich and poor (+14 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Whether legal aid reforms have achieved equal justice remains genuinely disputed. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1198; Longstanding antiblack socialization persists despite formal legal equality; Formal legal equality masks substantive inequality between rich and poor (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched #corroborates (0.92) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 959
• Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality #complicates (0.74) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793
• Legal rights require rigid binary categories that reject graded differences #complicates (0.72) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 755