The Indian National University of Law held a conference last year to address the question 'is there hope for equality law?' The answer was obvious. If the legal system is seen as hopeless, there is no hope for any type of law. Why might the legal system be hopeless? The answer is that if it isn't raising total factor productivity then it is parasitic and will be increasingly disintermediated. Equality rises as general purpose productivity rises and people in poorer countries begin to converge to the material standards of living available in wealthier places. True, rapid economic growth in a country raises inequality within the country. That's a good thing. It sets off a Tardean mimetic effect such that people find ways to raise their own general purpose productivity in emulation of more successful people.
Sadly, the good folk at the National Law University in Bangalore take a different view-
Is There Hope for Equality Law?
Not in the US under Trump.
After 10 successful iterations, as the conference travels to South Asia this year, we ask: is there hope for equality law? Inaugurating the global decolonial moment, the nations of the subcontinent constituted themselves into new republics with a lot of
ethnic cleansing. You either had dictatorship or dynasticism or a bit of both.
optimism and creative energy expended in reimagining and setting up just and fair societies.
Nonsense! Killing infidels doesn't make society just or fair.
Giving shape and form to the principle of equality in political, economic and social lives was foremost in their agenda.
Nope. Looting the country was foremost on the agenda. Also passing around the begging bowl. If Uncle Sam does not feed us and wipe our bums, we will starve to death.
But today, in the twenty-first century, there are growing concerns in this region, as there are all over the world, about the rise of inequality.
It rose long ago. Under Nehru, Princes got fat Privy purses. Mrs Gandhi got rid of this but created a Dynasty of her own. Rahul is deeply miffed that a lowly 'chai-wallah' now occupies the office held by his great grandfather, this grandmother and then his father.
In the recent past, we have witnessed the growing awareness of different conceptions of equality,
e.g rapists with big dicks should be incarcerated in female prisons where they can beat and rape women. Equality means I'm a teenaged girl who should be crowned Prom Queen.
including substantive and transformative equality, systemic and structural inequality, indirect and effects-based discrimination which have made it possible to respond not only to intentional harms but to institutional harms as well.
Sadly DOGE is ridding us of many of the harms these woke nutters created.
There has also been an expansion in the canon of identity characteristics protected under equality law.
But that law leaves 90 percent of the working population to fend for itself. Even the 10 percent in the organized sector get little protection. Indian labour law says that nobody can be made to work for more than 48 hours. Tell that to a guy at INFOSYS. He will laugh himself to death.
Yet, despite these gains and the centrality of equality to the political and legal order of so many countries, stakeholders around the world are questioning whether the legal right to equality is capable of addressing current inequalities.
They are asking whether the thing isn't a nuisance and a tool for harassment.
There are concerns that equality law is not up to the challenges of the climate crisis;
also it can't prevent asteroids crashing into the Earth.
ever-increasing wealth and income inequality; with the ever-widening disparities in access to rights and justice on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex and disability; tax injustice; growing informal work, the demonization of migration, the decay of democratic institutions, the power of multi-nationals, or the rise of artificial intelligence.
Most of these things have been ameliorated over the last few decades because total factor productivity has risen. Why pretend that the reverse is the case? If you keep crying wolf, nobody will help you when the wolf eats you.
This conference asks the bold question: In light of the doubts on the relevance of equality, is there hope for equality law?
A society can choose to fall behind other countries by focusing on equality rather than efficiency. The problem is that it may be invaded. Just as there was a guns vs butter trade-off, there is a trade off between ensuring that the average soldier is disabled, drug addicted, and incessantly undergoing gender conversion surgery, and not getting conquered by Putin's goons.
The aim of the conference is to explore whether and how equality law can take the next step forward
by destroying employment
and offer insights and remedies to contemporary global challenges. Scholars and activists have used equality law to diagnose how laws, policies and programmes have created or enhanced poverty, disadvantage, stereotypes, stigmas, prejudice, oppression, and social exclusion.
Bad laws can fuck up a country only so much because the courts can be disintermediated or ignored.
These laws, policies and programmes have been challenged in domestic, regional, and international courts and decision-making bodies.
And then those challenges were themselves challenged.
Although equality law has at best had a mixed record of success and failure, does it still have any untapped promise and potential to ensure that the world is fairer and more just for all peoples?
No. The Law has no magic power. It is merely a service industry. If it is shitty it will be disintermediated.
We are seeking paper proposals that address the broad questions posed by the conference. We encourage proposals to explore the following concepts and questions: the tension between equality and other foundational values such as liberty or other ideologies such as neoliberalism or neocolonialism
That tension ended long ago when Communism crawled into a corner and died. Guys who gassed on about neoliberalism now face Trump who wants to put tariffs on everything. He also wants to conquer Canada and Greenland and maybe Panama. If Colonialism is back on the table, why gas on about neo-colonialism?
the debates on the aims of equality law, such as debates on redistribution and recognition
Why am I not recognized as the cat who is also the Galactic overlord? Also, how about redistributing your wife to me?
the role of affirmative action in redressing equality harms
Will affirmative action be struck down by the Bench? That's a better question.
the role of proactive powers and duties
they have no role if there is no money to pay for them.
the role of intersectionality in addressing systemic exploitation and oppression
i.e. letting thieves and muggers out of jail because their ancestors were exploited and oppressed.
the challenges of achieving equality in specific fields of life such as:
race, religion, caste, class and age discrimination (as illustration)
How come I'm not Pope? Is it coz I iz bleck?
informal employment and lack of social protection
this problem gets worse the more laws are enacted.
land, water and material resources
we need armies and police forces to secure them. The law has no magic power.
Indigenous rights
White and black people must leave 'Turtle Island'
language, cultural and ways of life
Why isn't Arabic being taught in Texan schools?
decolonization;
deporting Whites and Blacks from Turtle Island.
disability and ableism
Death is the biggest disability. Why are so few dead people getting hired as CEOs?
wealth and tax inequality
Law Professors should share their wealth with the custodial staff
family, public life and gender
Heterosexual men must chop off their dicks.
AI and technology
Ban everything. Let the Chinese take over the world.
citizenship, migration and statelessness
Deport Americans. Bring in refugees.
climate crisis
Ban death. After than ban bad weather.
violence
Defund the police
the impact of social justice movements on equality law
That impact was via legislatures.
the relationship of equality law with rising authoritarianism and democratic decay
equality and international law
Equality law may indeed have fuelled the rise of Trumpism.
CJI Chandrachud, with typical fatuity, addressed this useless Conference.
“In a formal equality paradigm all institutions are assumed to be inherently fair and only require removal of formal barriers to entry.
Nothing wrong with assuming you and others will be fair and then acting in accordance with this assumption.
However, how could institutions built in a hierarchy ridden world be so unquestionably egalitarian?
They could be if they were staffed by people who were assumed to be fair and who actually were fair. Equally, if institutions built in a fair world were staffed by people assumed to be unfair, they could not act in a fair manner. Expectations create reality.
Our systems are a creature of our creation
Not in India. The Brits created most of our systems.
and reflect our social realities.
British realities, not Indian ones.
The focus of equality and anti-discrimination law must now be to adopt a new role in different circumstances.
i.e. find new ways to fuck up the economy. Consider such and such Government Dept. or commercial Enterprise. Currently it is doing quite a good job. We must demand it do stupid, wasteful, shite in the name of equality and anti-discrimination. That way our country will fall further behind China. The air will become too poisonous to breathe. We will perish and be replaced by some race less interested in virtue signalling.
As we look to a future fraught with climate change disasters and the use of technology, let's commit to creating equitable structures to address these issues at the outset.
This idiot does not know that there is a trade-off between equity and efficiency- i.e. achievement. If we commit to 'equitable structures' either they will be disintermediated or the economy will collapse.
Equality is a moral, political and legal virtue.
No. It is a fact about the world which is useful for some purpose. I might say 'this Chinese electric car is fully equal in performance to a Tesla. Yet it costs one third as much. Let us buy the Chinese car'.
It holds all our social commitments together. As the Scottish feminist thinker of the nineteenth century Frances Wright said ‘equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it’.
She was wrong. The America she settled in had plenty of liberty precisely because it had even more inequality. What this meant was that Americans could kill any foreign or internal adversary.
Chandrachud is a believer in contextual comparativism. But that means looking at countries which were once as poor as India and following their example. It doesn't mean comparing yourself to very rich countries.
Consider the South Korean legal system which contributed to rapid growth from the Sixties onward. The first thing we note is that prosecution was inquisitorial- i.e. the focus was on detection and punishment. This meant that business owners couldn't do 'capital flight' through under-invoicing etc. Corrupt officials or politicians were caught and thrown in jail. The legislature passed pro-growth laws and the Courts ensured that implementation was fair and straightforward. One big difference between India and South Korea is that the latter has a very difficult National Judicial Exam and thus very few qualified lawyers- most of whom began their careers as prosecutors or sub-judges. In 2024, South Korea had 30,525 lawyers- a significant increase from 3,364 in 1997. Thus, it is only after South Korea's per capita income became 12 times greater than India that it had about the same number of lawyers per capita. But the South Korean lawyer has an average salary ten times that of his Indian counterpart. Why? Lawyers in South Korea raise total factor productivity. In India they lower it.
Chandrachud underlines the importance of institutional design in ensuring equity in access and process. Does he mean that more 'night-courts' and 'weekend courts' should be set up so that daily wage labourers have access to the Justice system? Does he advocate 'E-adalat'- i.e. electronic courts guided by generative AI on matters of law and which deliver judgments in vernacular languages? No. What he is talking about is Judges spending more time on showing off their knowledge of 'intersectionality' and 'cultural imperialism' in the course of lengthy judgments which end by referring the matter back to the very district court from which appeal was entertained 30 or 40 years ago.
Turning to a genuine political and legal issue in India- viz. whether sub-classification within groups qualifying for affirmative action is permissible- Chandrachud considers it permissible. This means that the 'creamy layer' may find its entitlements are significantly curtailed. It remains to be seen whether reservations are renewed for another ten years in 2030. One reason Dr. Ambedkar wanted a sunset clause on affirmative action was that, as an economist, he knew that Economic growth causes greater and greater heterogeneity with the result that Equality Law becomes otiose since the underlying 'identity classes' are dissolving. More importantly, as we enter a period of rapid geopolitical change, which may be accompanied by a retreat from free trade, countries will have to focus on efficiency so as to remain competitive and capable of defending themselves. Equality had its moment in the Sun at a time when general purpose productivity was rising in the organized sector. But the gig economy and glaring differences in productivity brought about by new technology means that the Sun has set on Equality.
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