Lecture, Barnard's Inn Hall, Thursday, 7 Mar 2024 - 18:00

Ancient Greek Ideas of Equality under the Law

the front of the supreme court of the united states

The Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen has posed the question, ‘equality of what?’ The value of equality depends on what standard is chosen. As ancient Greek thinkers recognized, equality can be deployed to exclude as well as to liberate, and its relationship to law and freedom needs to be interrogated.

If equal social freedom is a product of isonomia—the equal application of laws to all—those laws need to be free of systematic bias and command public respect. 

Professor Melissa Lane

Professor Melissa Lane

Gresham Professor of Rhetoric

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University and is also Associated Faculty in the Department of Classics and Department of...

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