Ancora sulle dimensioni dell’uguaglianza nel diritto privato

This article critically examines the uneasy relationship between private law and the principle of equality. Traditionally grounded in contractual freedom and autonomy, private law has long treated equality as an external or exceptional constraint rather than a constitutive value. By tracing the historical transformations of the legal subject – from the abstract individual of classical codifications, through the redistributive logic of post-war social legislation, to contemporary antidiscrimination law – the article shows how equality has entered private law in fragmented and often limited forms. Drawing on legal realism and intersectional theory, the analysis challenges the conventional opposition between equality and freedom, revealing the distributive effects of private law’s background rules and their role in producing material inequalities. Particular attention is devoted to the shift from universalist to identity-based equality and to the structural limits of anti-discrimination law. The article argues for a re-theorisation of private law grounded in substantive equality, understood as a precondition for genuine autonomy and for the democratic legitimacy of private ordering.