Unequal Compliance Burdens Under a Common Requirement: How the Same Rule Can Ask Different Amounts of Effort

This conceptual paper introduces Unequal Compliance Burdens Under a Common Requirement, a mechanism in which an identical requirement encounters different travel, care, resource, or access constraints. Records of equal compliance can conceal substantial differences in the time, money, effort, and assistance needed to satisfy the requirement. The paper distinguishes equality in the wording of a rule from equality or fairness in its burdens. Unequal effort must be traced to specified constraints; a judgment of unfairness requires an additional criterion. Common requirements can remain justified, and accommodations can respond to differing circumstances without abandoning the rule. The discussion connects the mechanism to a remark about legal equality in Anatole France’s Le Lys rouge and examines Tennessee v. Lane (2004). The Court summarized allegations that an inaccessible courthouse imposed unequal burdens on a wheelchair user required to appear. Its ruling concerned congressional authority to secure court access and did not settle every factual allegation. Part of the Power, Permission, and Obligation series within On Human Modeling, the paper asks what compliance costs, what its records omit, and who can provide accommodation. Its framework can inform human–AI research on whether common interface or workflow requirements impose unequal burdens that completion records do not show.