Knowledge At The Service Of Humanity

“Difference Made Legal:” The Case for Breaking Unjust Laws

On an ordinary South Carolina spring afternoon in 1944, George Stinney, a small seventh-grader, was out grazing the family cow with his little sister, Amie. That very evening, Stinney would be wrongly accused of murdering two white girls and quickly arrested. After interrogation by a sheriff without his parents present and an hour-long trial with an all-white jury, seeming miscarriages of justice which were both in actuality perfectly legal, George would be sentenced to death. There was no evidence against him, other than his dark skin. Tears streamed down his face as he sat on a too-large electric chair, propped up by a Bible, and waiting.

George Stinney’s case displays how unjust laws fail their purpose of serving the common good by wantonly harming individuals; and also showcases the prejudice motivating their implementation, making them hard to combat through legitimate means. Due to failing to uphold the burdens of government in acting for collective benefit, unjust laws are illegitimate, and, due to their disenfranchising nature, need to be broken to effect change. 

The first reason why unjust laws should be broken is that they do not focus on the common good and, as such, are illegitimate. As Rousseau first postulated, based on the near-universally accepted premise of governments deriving their power from the governed, laws are mutually-entered social contracts between governments who provide collective good and individuals who sacrifice freedoms for that good, and institutions that fail to uphold their end of the contract should be altered and abolished. 

The second reason why unjust laws should be broken is that they often disenfranchise individuals, preventing those people from seeking change unless broken. For example, the Civil Rights Movement, barred from electoral change by unfair literacy tests, grandfathering clauses, and racial violence, utilized non-electoral methods involving civil disobedience to achieve great change on issues such as segregation and the courtroom policies that led to George Stinney’s killing.

Some say that liberal democracies offer representative means of expressing popular will and therefore cannot be unjust in their policies. However, policies passed through completely fair votes can still disadvantage minority groups, and, as such, democracies can still be legitimate arenas for civil disobedience in rectifying this ‘tyranny of the majority.’

Historically, civil disobedience has been used to great ends. Mandela’s anti-Apartheid coalition used collective action to successfully remove segregative barriers that impeded the economic and physical mobility of Black South Africans. Meanwhile, movements like the Singing Revolution in the Baltics, often peaceful yet disobedient actions, saw the liberalization of much of post-Soviet Europe, allowing for freedom of the press, speech, and democratic contestation.

Though the issues within George Stinney’s world that directly led to his death 78 years ago may have been rectified, their root cause in prejudiced governments enacting unjust laws that target and disenfranchise certain groups nevertheless persist. Combatting those regimes with civil disobedience has caused waves of change throughout the last century, and, in a world in which the nature of laws is constant, will remain a sound option. 

“A Sea of Blood:” The Case Against Civil Disobedience

On April 15th, 1989, former Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who urged sweeping democratization of China’s authoritarian government and had recently been ostracized for his liberalism, abruptly died of a heart attack. Small-scale protests for reconciliation of the fiery reformist would be held by students, who, throughout a sweltering April and May, would intensify their demands to press freedom and governmental transparency, congregating in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and defying bans on mass gatherings and protest. Joined by labor, police, and even lower party officials, similarly angered by inflation, corruption, and mismanagement of economic reform, the protestors reached critical mass, necessitating an urgent response from Party leadership. On June 4th, 1989, 300,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army descended on the Chinese capital, indiscriminately gunning down bystanders and protestors and crushing innocent civilians with tanks, staining Beijing’s avenues with the blood of thousands. Student leaders would be ‘disappeared’ en masse, progressives banished from government, and China’s momentum toward political reform would grind to a halt, never to be restarted.

The Tiananmen Square protests demonstrate the potentially bloody consequences of breaking unjust laws, especially under oppressive authoritarian regimes, and furthermore display the potential for halting or even reversion of progress emanating from civil disobedience. Even if done in support of the most righteous causes, which is never in practicality a given, the breaking of unjust laws rarely results in positive change, with electoral, judicial, and journalistic means offering more robust alternatives in democracies and passive routes of resistance presenting better outcomes in autocracies; and as such should not be attempted.

Before discussion of whether breaking or complying with unjust laws creates more positive change, however, the subjective nature of the justness of laws should be addressed. Different individuals with differing beliefs may view the same law dissimilarly. A libertarian who prizes personal freedom may view mask mandates as governmental overreach and therefore unjust, whereas a socialist who prioritizes collective security may view them as essential to societal wellbeing and therefore just. This healthy variation in political opinion makes coming to one societally agreed-upon standard of just laws impossible, meaning that while one group might deem defiance of a law civil disobedience, another might judge that same action a crime, raising contentious questions about the deservedness of punishment for said act. A simple solution in those instances would be to delegitimize the practice of civil disobedience, instead using legitimate and non-potentially-criminal means to contest said laws.

Furthermore, some individuals may hold extreme beliefs that laws that prevent discrimination against other individuals or otherwise guarantee universal moral principles are unjust, and would be justified in breaking those laws as an act of protest in a society where civil disobedience is viewed as universally appropriate. For example, a fascist in such a society could potentially be justified in hurling slurs at a racial minority before physically assaulting them if they claimed that they were doing so to protest hate crime legislation. Finally, some individuals may simply exploit the subjective nature of justice to deem any law they desire to break unjust, which threatens the principle of equal application of law to all individuals, or rule of law, that originated with Locke and that most constitutional states are built on. Simply put, a universal belief in the right of individuals to break any law they deem unjust lacks consideration of the subjective nature of justice or the possibility of people acting in bad faith, and therefore is faulty.

Under the best case assumption that all individuals seeking to break unjust laws are acting to advance objectively righteous progress, civil disobedience still offers worse outcomes than other pathways to change. In liberal democracies, engaging within established areas of discourse such as elections, courts, protest and the press often result in more progress than through civil disobedience.

For example, the American movement for LGBTQ+ rights in the steadily gained favorable press coverage through generally non-disobedient protest in the form of Pride marches throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and as such made queer rights politically popular as an opinion through shifting public opinion, resulting in court rulings such as Obergefell v. Hodges, which ended state prohibitions on same-sex marriage, and in legislation such as state-level protections against workplace discrimination of queer individuals. Meanwhile, movements such as the anti-war movement of the late 1960s have been made more polarizing by their use of civil disobedience tactics such as draft-dodging, putting off the general public and therefore postponing the achievement of their goals.

In undemocratic nations, civil disobedience simply is not legitimate as a course of action. In those nations, laws often prohibit protest and freedom of speech, and however illegitimate they may be, are backed by an entrenched regime that actively employs violence to enforce said laws. For example, the 1980 Gwangju uprising against Chun Doo-Hwan’s military regime South Korea was met with the massacre of its student proponents, similarly to in Tiananmen Square, and reprisals being conducted against of those involved. Whenever change has come in autocracies, it has often arisen from a change in the attitudes of power brokers such as the military and business interests, and not from grassroots civil disobedience movements. For example, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal that deposed the tyrannical regime of Marcelo Caetano in 1975 was first initiated by the Portuguese military, who, disgruntled with years of unnecessary colonial warfare, finally concluded an era of autocracy that many nonviolent protestors had been trying for decades to end.

In conclusion, the subjective nature of unjust laws and the very conception of justice prevent the creation of a universal standard of when breaking said laws is legitimate, raising unanswerable questions about the criminality of certain actions, while the exploitation of this by disingenuous individuals will undoubtedly occur, corrupting rule of law. Even in cases where individuals possess the genuine intention to break unjust laws to advance social change, other mechanisms in democratic and non-democratic states alike allow for more positive progress with less regression and bloodshed, and as such should be pursued.