In his famous book, The Law of the Constitution, Albert Venn Dicey asserted that the ‘rule of law’ embraces the idea of ‘equality before the law’. The connection that Dicey drew between legality and equality has inspired both praise and criticism in the century after his death. By placing a conception of equality at the heart of the rule of law, Dicey opened up promising but contested lines of inquiry into the nature of constitutionalism within the common law tradition. Where those lines lead depends, in part, on what Dicey meant by legal equality.

In many jurisdictions today, equality is understood to be a fundamental human right – a right to be free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, and other grounds, a right that furthers a vision of society in which everyone's equal moral worth is affirmed. The emergence of equality in this sense is usually understood to be part of the social changes that defined the latter half of the twentieth century. Could Dicey, a self-described ‘mid-Victorian’,2 have had anything so modern in mind by ‘equality before the law’? Surely not.

Yet this answer is only partly correct. An exploration of Dicey's work beyond The Law of the Constitution may suggest different perspectives for understanding the connection that he made between legality and equality in his book.