ABSTRACT
In an obvious but notoriously diluted sense, a lawmaker is concerned ex officio with promoting equality of treatment. It cannot be said that there are many startling similarities between the views of Albert Venn Dicey and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But one shared characteristic is an insistence on the equal application of law. The equal rule of law, as Dicey expounded it, involves at least one substantive requirement. It must not permit wide powers of discretionary action to be conferred on officials. A clash between equality on the one hand and liberty on the other occurs particularly where the equality concerned is that of access to publicly and privately supplied facilities of important kinds. The area in which the claims to enforcement of plausibly justifiable equality affect the claims of plausibly justifiable liberty is one where legal policy may be confused because individual morality is equally so.
