Concept of Equality before Law in Iranian and Germany’s 1849 Constitutionalism

One of the historical demands of Constitutionalism Movement was equality of the people before the law. Violation of equality principle was the cause of the corruption and legal decay of the independent monarchy. In response to this historical national demand, supplementary of the constitutionalism's Constitution reflected this historical demand in the form of a single article. Statement of this principle was faced with the protest of some groups of the society. These groups, on one hand, considered the equality before law to against their social class and union privileges and on the other hand, they understood it to be in conflict with Sharia. It appears that the recent group was seeing a content beyond its meaning in this principle and in addition, merged this problems with some fallacies. The new point that exists in the comparative study on the first issues revolving around this topic in Federal Germany Constitution and Iran’s supplementary Constitution is the similarity which was the motif of the protests and defenses in these two countries. In this article, after discussing the issue in the two countries, analogies of the reasons of both groups are outlined and particularly the arguments of the prominent lawyers presented in Germany's constituent assembly are compared with those of Naini and Mahalati through an analytic and comparative method. Such studies can serve to reveal new dimensions of the importance of the Constitutionalist jurisprudents' endeavors