No man is above the law ... except

No man is above the law and no man is below it.— U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt during his Third Annual Message to Congress on Dec. 7, 1903

Let me state clearly: the law must take its course.

— King Charles in the statement he issued Thursday after his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested by U.K. police on suspicion of misconduct in public office Friends of William have told me that he would have “no hesitation” in letting it be known that Andrew should face a “probe” police investigation if he were king. He genuinely believes the monarchy cannot remain popular and respected if it does not at least give the appearance of respecting the principle that no man is above the law. — Royal commentator Tom Sykes

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

— Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

Dickens’s observation — that the law’s most “pleasant fiction” is its insistence on a monetary agnosticism it manifestly does not possess — lands with special force in a culture that recites “no man is above the law” the way we as children were taught to recite the Lord’s Prayer: rhythm first, meaning somewhere back near the flagpole. The slogan has the narcotic smoothness of a well-worn coin. It glints. It circulates. It purchases moral reassurance at a discount rate. And yet, as anyone who has so much as peered into the vestibule of a courthouse (where the fluorescent lighting is less forgiving than Enlightenment rhetoric) can attest, the coin is not legal tender in quite the way we pretend. Not in reasonably well-run democracies like Canada and Britain. And certainly not in the corrupt kleptocracy the United States has become under Trump and his lickspittles.

The genius of the equal-before-the-law bromide is that it is formally true in the same way geometry is true. The angles sum. The axioms hold. The statute books do not contain a footnote that reads: “Except for those with diversified portfolios.” The trouble is that the law is not experienced as an axiom but as a process — expensive, protracted, Byzantine — and processes, unlike axioms, require fuel. Lawyers bill by the hour; expert witnesses do not accept exposure as payment; discovery is not discovered for free. To maintain that all are equal before the law is a bit like saying all are equal before the ocean: technically correct, but omitting the rather salient fact that some arrive in yachts and others clutch driftwood.

One is reminded of Anatole France’s mordant observation in his novel Le Lys Rouge that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Even better in French, that sentence is a small masterpiece of tonal bifurcation: “majestic equality” tolls like a cathedral bell, only to reveal that its echo is hunger. The prohibition is symmetrical; the capacity to avoid violating it is not. The rich are not thereby elevated above the law; they are merely insulated from its most punitive interfaces. They do not need to sleep under bridges. They do not need to steal bread. The law’s equality is thus preserved in the way a museum preserves a butterfly — pinned, framed, and quite dead.

It is fashionable to counter that the system, while imperfect, contains internal correctives: appellate review, public defenders or legal aid lawyers, the occasional galvanizing scandal. And yes, there are moments when the façade cracks and one glimpses something like accountability. As it did today on Trump’s boneheaded bully-boy tariffs, the Supreme Court of the United States will occasionally issue a decision that rebukes overreach; a prosecutor will bring charges against a well-heeled executive; a jury will surprise pundits who mistake cynicism for clairvoyance. These instances are then brandished as proof that the maxim holds. See? No one is above the law.

But “above” is a spatial metaphor, and spatial metaphors mislead. The more accurate image is not vertical but viscous. The law is a medium through which different bodies move at different speeds.

Wealth reduces friction. It purchases time — continuances, adjournments, strategic delays that transmute justice from a reckoning into an endurance contest. It purchases narrative — public relations teams who can sand down the rough edges of indictment into something that resembles misunderstanding. It purchases expertise — counsel who know not only the rules but the referees. None of this places a person above the law per se. It simply makes the law less adhesive.

Consider the bleak hilarity of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, in which hapless protagonist Josef K. is arrested without being told the charge and spends the remainder of the novel wandering through an administrative labyrinth that appears to subsist on its own opacity.

Kafka’s nightmare is often read as allegory — bureaucracy unmoored from reason — but what gives it bite is its plausibility. Josef K. lacks not innocence (he may or may not be innocent; the novel refuses the comfort of clarity) but leverage. He cannot hire the right advocate, cannot secure the right introduction, cannot convert the absurdity into advantage. The law is not above him; it engulfs him.

If Kafka’s world feels exaggerated, it is only because most of us encounter its lesser versions in miniature: forms misfiled, hearings postponed, fines that metastasize into warrants.

The rejoinder that “no man is above the law” usually arrives trailing the scent of moral triumph. It is deployed when a powerful figure like Andrew is arrested or indicted, as though the arrest or indictment itself were the terminus of equality rather than its overture. But an arrest is not a charge or indictment, an indictment is not a conviction, and a conviction is not consequence in equal measure. There exists a species of defendant for whom the criminal process is an inconvenience, a reputational dip to be weathered before the market corrects. There exists another species for whom an arrest — let alone a conviction — is an existential sinkhole from which escape is statistically improbable. Both species are, in theory, subject to the same statutes. In practice, one hires a team; the other is assigned one.

At this juncture, defenders of the creed will accuse critics of cynicism, which is the last refuge of those who mistake diagnosis for disease. To note that money buys better representation is not to deny the moral aspiration of equality; it is to insist that aspiration without infrastructure is a species of self-congratulation. But if we truly believed that all are equal before the law, we would fund public defence at levels commensurate with prosecution. We would treat bail not as a revenue stream but as a narrow instrument. We would measure justice not by the elegance of our phrases but by the distribution of our outcomes.

Dickens, the former newspaper court reporter behind Mr. Bumble’s famous observation in Oliver Twist that sometimes “the law is a ass — a idiot,” understood that legal fictions are pleasant precisely because they anesthetize. They allow a society to narrate itself as fair while tolerating patterns that suggest otherwise. The phrase “no man is above the law” functions less as description than as incantation. It is spoken to conjure an image of blindfolded balance. Yet blindfolds, in the real world, are rarely impartial; they are placed on some and removed from others. The scales are exquisitely calibrated, but the weights placed upon them differ in density.

This is not an argument for abandoning the ideal. Ideals are necessary, if only as irritants. The point is that repeating the maxim does not realize it. Equality before the law is not a fact to be asserted but a condition to be engineered, and engineering requires materials. Until access to competent representation, time and institutional patience is less correlated with the “furniture of their pockets,” the maxim will remain what Dickens called it: a pleasant fiction. Pleasant, because it flatters. Fiction, because it omits the invoice.

And perhaps the most Dickensian irony is precisely this: the people most likely to insist that the law is blind are those who can afford to purchase it a very fine pair of glasses.