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“Legal aid is not charity but a constitutional necessity. Access to justice must not depend on financial capacity. Equality before law begins with equal access to legal remedies.”

— Shivanshu K. Srivastava

Last update Sept. 26, 2026. History

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“Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Equality (1943)

“…as I worked with the unionized labor, of the much larger labor force that was outside the purview of the protective labor laws, of any form of social security, access to justice, access to financial services, anything. That tugged at my heart. And those people were unorganized and had no strength to act to seek remedies.”

Ela Bhatt (1933) founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India (SEWA)

Discussion with Ela Bhatt, Founder, Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)

“The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.”

John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) United States Union Army officer and Supreme Court Associate Justice

1890s, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

“The legal bias for special protection for women has begun to wreak havoc with the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 238.

“As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system's administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:The law of nature is in that state put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

“The controversy between rule of law and rule of men was never relevant to women — because, along with juveniles, imbeciles, and other classes of legal nonpersons, they had no access to law except through men.”

Freda Adler (1934) Criminologist, educator

Source: Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975), P. 203.

“As it is the essence of justice ultimately to shape those relations in the sense of equality, so it is essential to the legal precept in its meaning to be directed toward equality, to claim to be susceptible of generalization or to be general in character.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

Rechtsphilosophie (1932)

“A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 9.
Science in a Free Society (1978)
Context: A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it.

“Socioeconomic equality and legal equality both fall short of the radicalism of Lockean equality. For neither of those forms of equality calls into question the authority of those who administer the legal system. … Both forms of equality call upon that power structure to do certain things; but in so doing, they both assume, and indeed require, an inequality in authority between those who administer the legal framework and everybody else.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

“Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.”

Dan Savage book Skipping Towards Gomorrah

Source: Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002), p. 165

“Legal aid is not charity but a constitutional necessity. Access to justice must not depend on financial capacity. Equality before law begins with equal access to legal remedies.”

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