#Equ and equal definition code#

To make the matter concrete: if a state spends equally $10,000 per student per year, but some students attend highly advantaged school districts flush with extracurricular assets, wealthy parents and donors, and low levels of poverty, whereas other students attend highly disadvantaged schools with high levels of student poverty, food insecurity, and fewer extracurricular or community assets, then simply spending the same amount is unlikely to produce true equality of opportunity. One of the things they recognized was that in order to have true equality of opportunity in education, in some cases the state or local government would have to spend more on disadvantaged students. Rodriguez that local and state funding formulas that afforded different per-pupil expenditures between districts did not violate the US Constitution, advocates moved the fight to state courts and brought claims under state laws. After the US Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio v. One of the first places where the term gained ground and acceptance was in the school funding battles of the 1980s and 1990s. This is where the idea of equity comes in.

In some cases, special accommodations or differential treatment may be required to achieve fairness and justice. That’s what the framers of the 14th Amendment appear to have meant in the Equal Protection Clause, which states that no state can 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'Īt some point, however, feminists, disability rights advocates, and racial justice advocates (among others) realized that merely treating people the same, in some circumstances, can result in unfairness. Thus, the idea of “equal protection of law” is essentially constitutionalizing and encoding the idea that the law must formally treat all persons the same, irrespective of their race, gender, or other identity or status.

#Equ and equal definition code#

And, similarly, the penalty would be greater if the criminal defendant was a slave or a commoner than if they were an aristocrat or a “superior” (in the language of the code of Hammurabi). Similarly, the penalty would be greater if the victim was a man instead of a woman or a child. So, for any particular crime, the penalty would be greater if the victim was an aristocrat and less if they were a commoner, and even less if they were a slave. To understand why it means this, we have to understand that for most of human history, going back to the Code of Hammurabi several millennia ago, most written legal codes explicitly discriminated between individuals depending upon their status-whether they were a slave, a commoner or an aristocrat, or whether they were a woman, a man or a child.

In general, however, and especially in the legal context, it refers to equal treatment-the idea that law and government should treat people the same irrespective of their identity or status. Unfortunately, they are both wrong.Įquality is an inherently ambiguous and slippery concept, because it can refer to something broad and capacious or to something narrow and precise. The host says he thinks “equity” refers to “equality of outcomes,” and Senator Sanders appears to agree.

There is a clip of US Senator Bernie Sanders making the rounds from a recent episode of Bill Maher’s HBO program, in which the host asked Senator Sanders to distinguish “equality” from “equity.” Senator Sanders explained that “equality” refers to “equality of opportunity,” but admits he is not sure what “equity” means.