Before the Merits Can Matter : Wealth, Legal Process, and the Unequal Capacity to Reach Judgment

Equality before law is usually imagined at the point of decision: the same rule, the same judge, the same burden of proof, and the same formal right to present a case. Yet legal systems do not begin at judgment. They begin with entry, advice, pleadings, disclosure, evidence, interim applications, waiting, negotiation, expert work, repeated appearances, costs exposure, and the continuing capacity to remain in the process. Two parties may therefore possess the same legal rights while possessing radically unequal capacities to keep those rights alive long enough for a court to decide what they mean. This article examines that interval between formal entitlement and merits adjudication. The paper introduces Merit Reachability to describe an institutional condition: the degree to which a legally serious claim or defense can realistically survive the procedural path required for its merits to become decision-relevant. Merit Reachability is distinct from the familiar idea of legal capability. Legal capability concerns a person's real opportunity and ability to navigate legal problems; Merit Reachability concerns whether the design, duration, cost, informational demands, and risk structure of a legal process permit a serious case to remain viable until merits can matter. The distinction shifts attention from whether the courthouse door is formally open to whether the route beyond the door can be sustained. The argument develops two further concepts. Legal Endurance is the capacity to absorb the monetary, temporal, cognitive, evidentiary, organizational, and risk costs of continuing a legal dispute. The Procedural Buffer is the stock of resources that prevents ordinary procedural setbacks from becoming case-ending events. Wealth can purchase both. It can buy specialized counsel, expert evidence, document review, repeated applications, strategic patience, the ability to reject an unfavorable early settlement, and time in which an adverse interim event does not immediately threaten housing, employment, liquidity, family stability, or organizational survival. The resulting inequality can arise without bribery, judicial bias, or formally unequal rules. This account builds on, but does not duplicate, classic access-to-justice scholarship. Galanter's repeat-player thesis identifies structural advantages held by parties who litigate repeatedly; Cappelletti and Garth distinguish formal rights from the institutions needed to make them effective; Rhode, Sandefur, Hadfield, Wilmot-Smith, Habbig and Robeyns, and more recent legal-capability work show how resources shape actual access. Empirical studies of housing representation likewise demonstrate that counsel can materially alter outcomes for low-income litigants. The present contribution is normative: it identifies reachability of merits as a distinct object of justice and asks what equality before law requires before adjudication occurs. The central thesis is the Merit-Reachability Principle: a legal order cannot plausibly claim equal justice merely because final decision rules are formally impartial if private resource differences predictably determine whether legally serious claims and defenses can survive long enough to receive a merits determination. The principle does not require equal expenditure, equal lawyers, guaranteed trials, or equal outcomes. Nor does it condemn settlement, procedural complexity, fee shifting, or differential resource use as such. It requires that procedure remain proportionate to the stakes and that the system resist converting wealth differences into systematic differences in the practical ability to reach judgment. The paper closes with a framework for evaluating legal processes through six questions: entry, comprehension, representation, endurance, bargaining integrity, and merits conversion. It argues that legal equality is not exhausted by neutrality at t