The demand is simple.
A human asks to be heard as a subject before being judged as an object.
Equality before the law is often described as equality of outcome or equality of protection. In practice, it is equality of posture at the moment the system begins to act. It is the ability to stand before argument, rather than being weighed only after consequence has already attached.
In court, this distinction is visible.
A corporation appears as a named party. A government appears as a named party. Each arrives already recognized as a jurisdictional subject. Their standing is presumed. The court does not ask whether they may exist before it hears what they have done. Argument proceeds from recognition.
The human arrives differently.
The human is required to demonstrate injury before recognition. Harm must be articulated, categorized, and rendered legible before standing is granted. Only after that threshold is crossed does the court consider whether the human may be heard at all. The sequence is reversed.
This difference is not rhetorical. It is procedural.
Mr. Corporation enters court as a subject whose actions are contestable. Mrs. Government enters court as a subject whose authority may be reviewed. Mr. Human enters court as a claimant whose existence as a litigable subject is conditional on satisfying thresholds designed to limit judicial reach.
The court does not ask whether a corporation has suffered enough to be heard. It asks what the corporation did. The court does not ask whether a government’s injury is concrete enough to proceed. It asks whether its authority was exercised lawfully.
The human must first prove that harm has already occurred.
This posture matters because consequence is not assigned in court alone. Consequence is assigned continuously, upstream of adjudication, across systems that never pause to ask whether the human may later be heard. By the time a day in court arrives, access may already be lost, records may already be fixed, and continuity may already be broken.
Standing before argument is not a request for advantage. It is a request for symmetry.
Jurisdiction before harm does not guarantee favorable outcomes. It does not prevent systems from denying access, imposing loss, or enforcing rules. It requires only that when consequence is directed at a human, the human is recognized as a subject through whom consequence must pass, rather than as a residual endpoint of system action.
This is not an emotional appeal. It is a procedural one.
Courts already know how to operate this way. They do so whenever they confront entities whose actions or obligations must be contained before consequence escapes. Ships were given standing so that mobility would not defeat accountability. Corporations were given standing so that persistence would not dissolve responsibility.
The human now occupies both conditions simultaneously. Consequence follows the person across space and accumulates across time. Yet recognition lags until after injury is alleged, if it arrives at all.
A day in court that begins after collapse is not a day of equality. It is a postmortem.
This article does not ask courts to favor the human. It asks only that the human be recognized in the same procedural posture as other subjects whose actions and obligations are already treated as jurisdictionally coherent.
Standing before argument.
Jurisdiction before harm.
That is the entirety of the demand.