About EQUALS
Law and the struggle for equality
EQUALS is Utrecht Law School’s research platform on equality and non-discrimination. We bring together legal scholars who want to understand -and challenge- how laws and institutions shape inequality in people’s lives.
Laws do not just reflect society, they help create it. They can protect people from unfair treatment, but also reinforce systems that exclude, silence, or discriminate. EQUALS researchers look closely at how legal rules, practices, and institutions both contest and sustain inequalities across areas like work, education, migration, family, technology, and access to justice.
We work on questions that matter in people’s everyday lives:
- Who is protected by law — and who is not?
- How are gender, race, class, disability, sexuality, or immigration status treated in legal systems?
- How can legal systems better address structural forms of injustice?
What we focus on
Our research pays particular attention to:
- Structural and institutional discrimination — not just individual unfairness, but the deeper rules and routines that keep inequality in place.
- Intersectionality — how different forms of disadvantage (like sexism, racism, ableism or homophobia) connect and overlap.
- The role of legal systems — how courts, laws, and state institutions shape and respond to inequality.
- Equality data and methods — how we know what we know about inequality, and who gets left out when data is missing or misleading.
How we work
We combine doctrinal legal analysis with tools from other disciplines -such as history, criminoloy, sociology, and antropology- to better understand how inequality works in practice. Many of us also use feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial legal theories to uncover blind spots in the law.
We collaborate with societal partners, such as NGOs, human rights bodies, and activists, and with colleagues in other UU faculties and abroad. We involve students in our work through research projects, community-engaged education, and workshops.
Inequality affects people’s lives every day and law plays a role. At EQUALS, we want to understand these dynamics and transform them.
Why this matters
Inequality affects people’s lives every day. Whether it is discrimination in the workplace, unequal access to services, or exclusion from legal protection, law plays a role. At EQUALS, we want to understand these dynamics and transform them.