Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Disobedience and the Duty to Obey the Law: Where Do We Go From Here?

Not so long ago, several friends joined approximately 40,000 others in DC demanding action on climate change and opposing the Keystone pipeline. They left Illinois committed to breaking the law and getting arrested in front of the White House, as they put it, in the spirit of Dr. King. The law they broke when they got there was an anti-trespass type ordinance. They sat and waited to be ordered to move. They refused. They were arrested, fined and released the same day. Being a lawyer, the son of a New York City police officer, and sometimes an activist I couldn\u27t help but wonder when if ever it was okay to violate a law that is not itself unjust, and what Dr. King actually thought about civil disobedience. The paper begins with a brief argument that democratic law is a moral idea. It then discusses in detail the thoughts and actions of Dr. King as they relate to the law, and to law-breaking as a movement tactic. It also briefly looks at contemporary activist thinking on disruption, violence, and law-breaking as a tactic of social change

Uncivil Disobedience and Democracy: An American Perspective

From the time of the Athenian democracy there has been the debated question of whether protest and dissent, especially uncivil disobedience to the law was supportive or destructive of a people’s democracy. The debate continues unabated today. In a recent collection of essays titled Protest and Dissent, Professor Susan Stokes offered an answer to the question Are Protests Good or Bad for Democracy? (Schwartzberg, 2020, p. 269). After considering both possibilities, she concludes, as had James Madison in Federalist 10, that protests “are a natural by-product of freedoms of expression and association which, if curtailed, would threaten democracy itself.”(Schwartzberg, 2020, pp. 281). Building a society that is democratic and recognizes the need for frequent reform is challenging. In meeting those challenges difficult and profound moral choices often confront us