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17 Ga. L. Rev. 245 (1982-1983)
Why Equality Matters

handle is hein.journals/geolr17 and id is 255 raw text is: GEORGIA LAW REVIEW VOLUME 17 WINTER 1983 NumRwa 2 WHY EQUALITY MATTERS* Kenneth L. Karst** I. EQUALITY: FROM FORM TO SUBSTANCE The ideal of equality is one of the great themes in the culture of American public life. From the Declaration of Independence to the Pledge of Allegiance, the rhetoric of equality permeates our sym- bols of nationhood. Over and over in our history, from the earliest colonial beginnings, equality has been a rallying cry, a promise, an article of national faith. So it is that the ideal of equality touches our emotions. All these aspects of equality-protest, hope, and faith, infused with emotion-came together on an August after- noon now almost two decades past, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to an enormous multitude at the Washington Monu- ment, repeatedly returning to the same words: I have a dream. The metaphor of the dream was Dr. King's way of making vivid the contrast between the American Constitution's promise of equality and the realities of race relations in 1963. One of the ma- jor facts of life in our nation-as, indeed, in every human group that can be called a nation-has always been inequality. Yet the theme of equality retains great power not merely as a protest ideal or a disguise for privilege but as an appropriate name for the goals of hardheaded reformers. Martin Luther King may have been a dreamer, but he knew how to get down to cases, from segre- * The John A. Sibley Lecture in Law delivered at the University of Georgia School of Law on October 28, 1982, revised and expanded for publication. ** Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles. I am grateful for the careful and caring readings of an earlier draft of this paper by these colleagues at UCLA and else- where: Gregory Alexander, Harold Bruff, Catherine Hancock, Gary Schwartz, Steven Shif- frin, Jonathan Varat, and Peter Westen. I G. SARToRi, DiommcRic THEORY 326-27 (1962).

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