Civil Disobedience vs. the Rule of Law

Law, and obedience to the law, is necessary for an orderly society. As the Framers believed, all legitimate forms of government must derive their authority from the consent of the governed. In the American republic, citizens are expected to assent to and obey laws that are duly passed by their local, state, and federal government.

Only in extreme circumstances, when citizens feel profoundly opposed to a law or policy of the government, can they defy that law (of course, they are then subject to arrest, fines, and other consequences of their disobedience.) Defying a law that one considers unjust is called civil disobedience, an idea devised by European philosopher Berkeley, and espoused by the American writer Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay his taxes in Massachusetts in order to protest the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846-1847. Thoreau, who was jailed for his actions, opposed the war because he considered it unjust for the U.S. to seek to conquer another nation's territory and because he considered the war an effort to expand slavery. Thoreau believed that an individual's conscience trumps majority rule. As he puts it in his essay Civil Disobedience, majority rule is rule by the most powerful, the majority, over the least powerful, the minority. "A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it." Might doesn't make right: majority rule cannot decide matters of conscience. Just men and women have a moral duty, according to Thoreau, to resist unjust governments through civil disobedience. Other notable proponents of civil disobedience include the Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi (above) and the civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom used defiance of the law to advance their causes.