Equality before the law, also known as legal equality, is the principle under which all people are subject to the same laws of justice (due process). All are equal before the law.
Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law."
According to the United Nations, this principle is particularly important to the minorities and to the poor.
Thus, the law and the judges must treat everybody by the same laws regardless of their gender, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status etc, without privilege.
Equality before the law is one of the basic principles of classical liberalism.
Read more about Equality Before The Law: History, Classical Liberalism, Feminism, Nebraska, Parricide Law
Famous quotes containing the words equality and/or law:
“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding—and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (20th century)
“But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)