Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2025
Abstract
A long-held egalitarian view is that formal equality — the absence of formal legal distinctions based on the material resources of individuals — is regressive. If legal rules are the same for the rich and the poor, the rich benefit and the poor suffer. This Essay argues that this view is mistaken. Far from being synonymous with laissez-faire, a commitment to formal equality provides a counterweight to the key neoliberal maxim that regulation of the market economy should focus on efficiency alone. Moreover, a new view of formal equality offered here reveals a key advantage of predistribution over redistribution: Explicit redistribution is formally unequal, while predistribution can be achieved using only formally equal rules.
Disciplines
Economic Policy | Law | Law and Economics
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Alex Raskolnikov,
A New View of Formal Equality and a Case for Predistribution,
17
J. Legal Analysis
213
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4738