Despite their centrality within discussions on AI governance, fairness, justice, and equality remain elusive and essentially contested concepts: even when some shared understanding concerning their meaning can be found on an abstract level, people may still disagree on their relation and realization. In this chapter, we aim to clear up some uncertainties concerning these notions. Taking one particular interpretation of fairness as our point of departure (fairness as nonarbitrariness), we first investigate the distinction between procedural and substantive conceptions of fairness (Section 4.2). We then discuss the relationship between fairness, justice, and equality (Section 4.3). Starting with an exploration of Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness, we then position distributive approaches toward issues of justice and fairness against socio-relational ones. In a final step, we consider the limitations of techno-solutionism and attempts to formalize fairness by design (Section 4.4). Throughout this chapter, we illustrate how the design and regulation of fair AI systems is not an insular exercise: attention must not only be paid to the procedures by which these systems are governed and the outcomes they produce, but also to the social processes, structures, and relationships that inform, and are co-shaped by, their functioning.

The US Constitution committed to equality in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War. Legislators and judges quickly confronted the question of what these new provisions might mean for private actors. The Radical Republicans aimed to bring the commitment to equal protection into private spaces, propagating republican discourses about the practical requirements of equal citizenship and the potential duties of private actors. However, the Supreme Court soon reached its own countervailing conclusion that only state actors, not private actors, gained duties from the Reconstruction Amendments. While this latter understanding remained firm, private actors effectively gained obligations to equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later court decisions working around the initial cabining of constitutional equality. Later debates evince a revival of republican-inflected language and arguments for something like horizontal application, even while the country’s jurists viewed such an extension of rights as basically impossible. Several other episodes in constitutional politics, both at the national and state levels, would continue to revisit this question across a range of issue areas.

The framers of the Indian Constitution laid explicit foundation for horizontal application, specifically in Articles 15, 17, 23, and 24. The constitutional debates reveal deep disagreements about the country’s future. At the same time, the textual provisions for horizontal application evince a clear vision on the part of key framers, such as B. R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, to combat entrenched systems of caste and discrimination. These and other framers aimed to instill a new fraternity across the polity, in part by holding private actors accountable for constitutional commitments. In the ensuing years, the Supreme Court vacillated between emphasizing the constitution’s conservative and transformative elements, often under the watchful eye of other governing institutions. For example, the Court largely yielded to Indira Gandhi’s excesses during the Emergency Era of the 1970s, and later to the Hindu-nationalist BJP’s agenda. Likewise, the Court’s development of horizontal application has been somewhat uneven, applying constitutional duties to private actors in a handful of cases. In those instances, involving such salient issues as labor, sexual assault, housing, and education, the constitutional discourses that emerge echo republican rationales from the founding era.

A core purpose of South Africa’s Constitution was to modify private orderings growing out of Apartheid’s legacy of racism. Hence, the South African framers, and specifically those representing the African National Congress (ANC), had strong reason to adopt some version of horizontal application. While republican elements occur in some of the ANC’s early thought on private actors’ duties, such discourses featured less when the party had to find consensus with representatives of the Nationalist Party while negotiating the Interim Constitution. A strong formalist streak in the legal culture, concerns about preserving property rights, and the incentives of institutions such as the Supreme Court of Appeal all cut against the practice of horizontal application. Ultimately, the constitutional framers provided for both direct and indirect horizontal application in the Final Constitution. The ANC’s vision was thus fixed in this feature, and subsequent cases further cemented a break from prior orderings. Republican discourses ensued in cases involving horizontal application and perhaps most clearly in issues striking at the heart of the old Apartheid regime, such as housing and education.

Soon after the adoption of the new constitution and its own establishment, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the Basic Law had a “radiating effect” on all of German law and life, including private law. The Court reached this decision in the Lüth case amid much debate and a range of alternative understandings. Many legal actors worried that such a move toward horizontal application would blur the line between public and private law to the detriment of the civil law system. Following Lüth, jurists at all levels eventually assumed the Constitutional Court’s rationale that one could not speak of private law divorced from constitutional law. Still, certain elements of the German legal-political culture emphasized autonomy in private spaces. Likewise, constitutional actors largely considered cases relating to equality and antidiscrimination as a limit to horizontal application. As cases relating to such matters have arisen, the Constitutional Court and other constitutional actors have reexamined the reach of horizontal application. Republican discourses only extended so far in early understandings, but new forces, particularly in initiatives of the European Union, have led the Court and Bundestag to reassess how far into private spaces these rights commitments reach.

Social justice, human rights, and equality are norms based on the Holy Qur’an’s perspective. They are profoundly rooted in Islam’s teachings and promote the construction of a strong, interdependent, and healthy community. It emphasizes practicing them not only on Muslims but on every human being regardless of their religion or beliefs. The superiority of any individual is defined strictly on their piety and righteousness and not on skin color, race, biological sex, nationality, or social position. Allah has required justice to be an essential part of the behavior of every Muslim covering all aspects of life as well as all people.

This chapter offers an elaborate analysis of the position of same-sex couples and rainbow families under the ECHR and EU law. Addressing issues such as marriage and partnerships, parenthood and parental responsibility, but also social benefits, family reunification and the legal recognition of family ties established abroad, the chapter takes the view that the recognition and protection of family relationships can follow multiple paths and that the ECtHR case law and EU law are mutually reinforcing for the benefit of the rights of same-sex couples and their children. The chapter also acknowledges that subsidiarity considerations lead European bodies to favour a compromise approach, refraining from forcing states to abandon their traditional conception of family law’s fundamental institutions: marriage and parenthood. The chapter, nevertheless, suggests that, at some point in the future, the increased visibility and legitimacy of same-sex couples and rainbow families should ultimately lead to imposing a European and inclusive understanding of these institutions.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

In this chapter, I first examine how the rule of law has been defined in legal theory, and how it has been distinguished from the rule by law, which is a distortion thereof (Section 3.1). Second, I assess how the rule of law has been conceptualised in the context of the European Union, as this book focuses primarily on the EU legal order (Section 3.2). In this regard, I also draw on the acquis of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is a distinct jurisdictional order, yet it heavily influenced the ‘EU’ conceptualisation of the rule of law, and the EU regularly relies on Council of Europe sources in its own legal practices. Finally, I draw on these findings to identify the rule of law’s core principles and to distil the concrete requirements that public authorities must fulfil to comply therewith (Section 3.3). Identifying these requirements – and the inherent challenges to achieve them – will subsequently allow me to build a normative analytical framework that I can use as a benchmark in Chapter 4 to assess how algorithmic regulation impacts the rule of law.

Chapter 4 explores Grouchy’s first elaboration of a specifically republican political philosophy during the French Revolution. It describes how, together with Condorcet, Paine, Brissot and others, she founded the first explicitly republican journal of the Revolution in 1791: Le Républicain. It explores the context for her declaration of republicanism: the flight of Louis XVI from Paris in June 1791. It demonstrates how, in the articles she contributed to this journal and other anonymously published pieces, Grouchy elaborated on the theory she had been developing between 1786 and 1791. She added an unambiguously anti-royal element to her thought, arguing that a king can never feel sympathy with his people, and can therefore never be a just ruler. This Chapter explores how she drew, in particular, on the ideas of Paine, but also describes a major intellectual and political fissure that developed between Grouchy and her ‘Brissotin’ allies during this period. While they advocated an offensive European war after 1791, she argued against one. Due to her reliance on mutual sentiment between ruler and ruled as the basis of political society, she opposed, on philosophical grounds, the sending of ‘armed missionaries’.

This chapter provides an overview of this book’s core arguments and structure.

This chapter moves to the last phases of the French occupation in parts of Germany and to the improved position of the local Jews in these regions. It then concentrates on the efforts to legalize Jewish equality in the constitution of the new German Bund, discussed in a special committee at the Congress of Vienna, and within this context, it examines the position of a number of important German politicians towards Jewish emancipation. While Wilhelm von Humboldt’s liberal approach is relatively well known, but appears to be more complex on taking a closer look, it is interesting to observe the position of another Prussian politician, Karl August von Hardenberg, and especially that of the Austrian foreign minister chairing the entire congress, Metternich. Both were much more conservative, but still supported Jewish equality, insisting it must apply to Germany as a whole. In the end, this question remained undecided, like so many other issues relating to the planned constitution, mainly because of the pressure from the presumably much more liberal bourgeoisie in the various cities of the new Bund.

The CRC does not define the beginning of childhood, only its end. Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born and has a rational mind. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique as a human right since it does not require either mind or body for its realization, as it is based on age and not the body and mind. The CRC is constructed to cover every child and in some cases from conception, which means that the rights of the child cannot meet liberal rights’ ideas of freedom as a foundation since the individual freedom is conditioned on the immaterial rational mind controling the material body, which the unborn child or very young child do not possess.