Law converts difference into sameness to enable formal equal treatment

Evidence

It offers not merely the treating of like alike that forms the basis especially of liberal systems of justice, but the making of difference into sameness so as to be able to treat “like” alike, through the language ~ the /exicon, as Comaroff (1998: 343) points out ~ of the law. Here law’s language becomes the medium of symbolic, cultural, commodity and capital circulation and exchange, the producer and arbiter of difference, the maker, mediator, and manager of disputes. Nevertheless, in order to effect such mediation the ’ de facto differences occluded by law’s homogenizing imperative become repressed, to sometimes devastating effect. — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how liberal legality’s homogenizing gesture operates: making difference into sameness rather than merely treating like alike.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘On Sacrifice’ theme of law/order stabilizing stratified social relations through seemingly neutral formal categories.
• XREF: connects to: Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786; Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793; Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959 (+5 more)

Related

• Formal equality is the only equality any legal system can guarantee (similarity 0.84)
• Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference (similarity 0.83)
• Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality (similarity 0.82)
• Formal equality doctrine becomes a weapon against material equality (similarity 0.82)
• Modern law manufactures the very uniformity it claims merely to recognize (similarity 0.81)
• Formal legal equality cannot deliver justice without social equality (similarity 0.80)
• Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched (similarity 0.79)
• Formal equal right applied to unequal individuals necessarily produces inequality. (similarity 0.79)
• Formal law substitutes for the informal norms of homogeneous societies (similarity 0.79)
• Law’s universal formalism requires customization to address race, gender, and class. (similarity 0.78)