Abstract

This thesis investigates how Egypt’s legal system, structurally tilted toward the elite and constitutive of inequality, has interacted with the country’s entrenched culture of class-based discrimination to produce a legal culture uniquely comfortable with hierarchy. It contends that class-based discrimination in Egypt has evolved from a social prejudice into a juridical condition, one in which the law does not merely mirror inequality but actively constructs and rationalizes it. By examining the intersection between legal structure and Egypt’s entrenched moral order of class-based discrimination, the study reveals a legal culture that no longer hides its hierarchies behind the veil of neutrality but articulates them as expressions of order and respectability. Drawing on Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu, and informed by Hale, Galanter, and the Critical Legal Studies movement, the thesis demonstrates how doctrines such as “harm,” “suitability,” and “family values” transform social prejudice into legal principle. Through case studies in family law, public appointments, and the Cybercrime Law, it exposes how judicial discourse and administrative discretion translate class morality into legal reason. In doing so, Egyptian law emerges not only as a passive reflection of class hierarchy but as one of its most efficient architects. The thesis ultimately calls for a reorientation of legal scholarship toward reflexivity, one that recognizes law’s complicity in reproducing hierarchy and confronts its own comfort with inequality as the price of its authority.

School

School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Department

Law Department

Degree Name

LLM in International and Comparative Law

Graduation Date

Fall 2-15-2026

Submission Date

1-16-2026

First Advisor

Hani Sayed

Committee Member 1

Amr Shalakany

Committee Member 2

Hedayat Heikal

Extent

76 p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Not necessary for this item

Disclosure of AI Use

Thesis editing and/or reviewing; Study/research methodology development

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