The claim that the law can be an inequality-reducing weapon is a staple of legal and
political discourse. Although it is hard to dispute that legal provisions sometimes work to reduce
inequality, we argue that, at least in the domain of equal opportunity in education, the pattern of
these effects can be more perverse than has typically been appreciated. Positive laws implemented
in the name of promoting equality of opportunity may yield only a narrowly formal equality, with the
goal of substantive equality undermined because a high-profile reform will often expose the pathway
to educational success. The pathway, once exposed, can then be navigated and successfully subverted
by the socioeconomically advantaged. We illustrate such pitfalls of a positive legal approach by
examining educational inequality in Egypt, a country with long-standing constitutional protections
for equality of opportunity in education. Using data recently collected from a cohort of young people,
we show that despite the institutional commitments to equality of opportunity present in Egypt,
privileged families have a range of options for subverting the aims of positive legal provisions. We
argue that the pattern of educational inequality in Egypt is distinctive relative to countries without
similar legal protections.