Courts process inequality

Courts don’t deliver justice. They process inequality into legally acceptable forms.

──── The production line of legitimacy

Every courthouse operates as a processing facility. Raw inequality enters through one door, passes through procedural machinery, and exits as “lawful” inequality through another.

The transformation is crucial. Naked power becomes dressed power. Arbitrary outcomes become reasoned judgments. Social violence becomes legal order.

This isn’t a bug in the system. This is the system.

──── Equal treatment of unequal people

“Equal justice under law” is carved into courthouse facades, but equality before the law assumes equality before entering the courthouse.

A homeless person and a billionaire receive the same constitutional protections on paper. In practice, one arrives with public defenders carrying 150 cases, the other with teams of specialists who’ve mapped every procedural pathway.

The law treats them equally in the same way that prohibiting both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges treats them equally. The formal equality masks substantive inequality.

──── Procedural ritual as value substitution

Legal procedure substitutes for substantive justice. If the forms are followed correctly, the outcome becomes “just” regardless of its material effects.

Due process becomes an end in itself rather than a means to fair outcomes. The ritual performance of fairness replaces actual fairness.

Courts excel at this substitution because procedure is measurable, while justice is not. You can audit whether proper notice was given, whether evidence rules were followed, whether appeals deadlines were met. You cannot audit whether justice was done.

──── The privilege pricing system

Justice operates on a fee-for-service model disguised as neutral procedure.

Legal representation, expert witnesses, investigative resources, appeal processes—everything has a price. The system then pretends these market transactions don’t affect outcomes.

Wealthy defendants don’t just buy better lawyers. They buy time for investigation, resources for discovery, expertise for challenges, and access to appellate review. They purchase different justice, not just better representation of the same justice.

──── Institutional capture by class

Courts are staffed by people who succeeded within existing inequality structures. Judges, lawyers, court administrators—they navigated elite educational systems, professional networks, and social hierarchies to reach their positions.

This isn’t conscious bias. It’s structural alignment. The system selects for people whose experiences and interests align with maintaining the systems that elevated them.

They genuinely believe the system works because it worked for them. Their success proves its fairness in their minds.

──── Settlement as inequality preservation

Most cases never reach trial. They settle. This isn’t efficiency—it’s inequality preservation through private negotiation.

Settlement amounts correlate with defendant resources more than plaintiff injuries. The process filters cases based on economic capacity rather than legal merit.

Wealthy defendants can outlast plaintiffs through extended litigation. Poor defendants must accept whatever terms avoid immediate catastrophe. The settlement system processes these resource disparities into “voluntary” agreements.

──── The feedback loop

Courts legitimize inequality, which creates conditions for more inequality, which requires more legitimization.

Each “lawful” foreclosure enables more predatory lending. Each “justified” environmental exemption enables more toxic exposure in poor communities. Each “proper” sentence maintains racial disparities in incarceration.

The legal precedents created by processing today’s inequality become tomorrow’s legal framework for processing more inequality.

──── Alternative dispute resolution as parallel processing

Mediation, arbitration, and other ADR mechanisms aren’t alternatives to court inequality—they’re expansion packs.

These systems promise faster, cheaper justice while operating with the same underlying resource disparities. They simply process inequality through different procedural channels.

Corporate arbitration clauses force individual consumers into private systems where the arbitrators’ continued employment depends on corporate satisfaction. This isn’t dispute resolution. It’s dispute processing with predetermined outcomes.

──── The measurement problem

Courts quantify the unquantifiable to make inequality processing seem objective.

Pain and suffering become dollar amounts. Years of life become sentencing guidelines. Constitutional violations become qualified immunity standards.

This quantification isn’t neutral math. It embeds social valuations about whose suffering matters, whose time is valuable, whose rights deserve protection.

When a court awards $50,000 for wrongful death in one case and $5 million in another, it’s not calculating objective values. It’s processing social hierarchies into legal mathematics.

──── Truth as procedural artifact

Legal truth differs from factual truth. Courts don’t discover what happened—they determine what can be legally proven under evidentiary rules.

These rules reflect power structures. Hearsay restrictions favor those who can produce live witnesses. Documentary evidence requirements favor those who create and preserve records. Expert testimony standards favor those who can purchase expertise.

The “truth” that emerges from this process isn’t what actually occurred. It’s what survived the inequality-embedded procedural filter.

──── International courts as inequality amplification

International legal systems process inequality between nations the same way domestic courts process inequality between individuals.

Wealthy nations have permanent legal staff, sophisticated intelligence gathering, and diplomatic leverage. Poor nations have overwhelmed legal aid and limited investigative capacity.

International law becomes a mechanism for legitimizing global power structures rather than constraining them. The strongest nations shape the legal frameworks they then claim to follow.

──── The reform trap

Reform efforts typically focus on improving inequality processing rather than eliminating inequality sources.

Better public defender funding, faster case processing, clearer sentencing guidelines—these changes make the system more efficient at converting inequality into legal outcomes.

Real reform would require addressing the resource disparities that enter the courthouse, not just improving how courts handle those disparities once they arrive.

──── Beyond processing

Recognizing courts as inequality processors rather than justice deliverers changes the strategic calculation.

Energy spent perfecting legal arguments might be better spent addressing underlying resource disparities. Focus on changing material conditions rather than legal interpretations.

This doesn’t mean abandoning legal strategies entirely. It means understanding their function within the larger inequality processing apparatus.

────────────────────────────────────────

Courts will continue processing inequality as long as inequality exists to process. The question isn’t how to make courts more just, but how to create conditions where their inequality processing function becomes irrelevant.

Until then, every courthouse remains a factory where social hierarchy enters as input and legal legitimacy emerges as output. The machinery operates smoothly, efficiently, and according to proper procedure.

And that’s precisely the problem.