Colm O’Cinneide provides a critical overview and analysis of equality - a universal legal concept, the right to which is guaranteed by many written constitutions, international human rights treaties and regional instruments. O’Cinneide argues that ‘the overall impact of these various legal expressions of the principle of human equality has been mixed… ‘equality’ appears to be an open-ended and indeterminate concept, capable of giving rise to multiple and often conflicting accounts of its ‘proper’ meaning’. Surveying the different constructions of ‘equality’, O’Cinneide concludes that ‘it may be a more fruitful enterprise to define the equality principle in negative terms as requiring legal intervention to prevent the occurrence of certain forms of discrimination and demeaning treatment, rather than trying to establish through abstract moral reasoning exactly what true ‘equality’ is’.