ABSTRACT
There is an assumption at the heart of any legal system that considers itself to be liberal. This is that all citizens should be treated as equal in the eyes of the law. Any challenge to this assumption is immediately in danger of being labelled as one, or more, of those things that such liberal systems despise (fascist, élitist, oppressive, etc). In this paper, I will be looking at this ‘given of equality’. It may seem that the idea that there might be something wrong with the idea of equality is so alien to our culture that it verges on the ridiculous, if not the dangerous. However, we need only to ask such a simple question as ‘whose equality?’ to start down the road to what I hope will be a fruitful examination of this concept, upon which so much of our legal theory is dependent. This critique will be presented as an exposition of the work of the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray. I will be endeavouring to show that she is able to give a convincing answer to the question, ‘Whose equality?’ and that her answer troubles this notion so much that it also demands a completely different foundation for the law – a foundation in difference.
