“Material equality”

Interdisciplinary and international conference

Responsible for the project: Prof. Dr. Ute Sacksofsky in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Anna Katharina Mangold

Project description

Different understandings of equality are currently culminating in conflicts over what are the necessary conditions for thriving coexistence in a democracy. While populist movements adhere to substantively homogeneous ideas of equality, historically excluded groups of people are insisting on their equal rights and demanding equal rights, not just formally, but in fact.

Legal history studies trace how initially formal concepts of equality are gradually supplemented by material understandings of equality. From a philosophical perspective, such material concepts of equality mean a significant increase in complexity, not least because they raise the question of justice in a much more differentiated way. In addition, material concepts of equality must be thought of as “intersectional” from the outset, as gender studies have shown, and thus focus on internal hierarchies within categorically defined groups of people.

Material concepts of equality pose major methodological challenges for legal concepts of equality, because the view of the relevant norms must be supplemented by a view of the effects of these norms in the reality of the lives of the persons and groups of persons concerned. A purely law-internal, norm-centered view is confronted with social science knowledge and must be supplemented by this in order to make the different effects on different groups of people visible. Legal practice, in turn, reacts with the development of new dogmatic figures that allow the more complex understanding of equality to be reflected in legal proceedings. These include, in particular, indirect discrimination, the right to reasonable accommodation and equality measures.

The conference brings together German-speaking experts to discuss these developments and different disciplinary perspectives on material understandings of equality in a systematic way.

International conference
Material Equality
November 14 and 15, 2019, Frankfurt am Main