Leibman's Civil Disobedience

794 Words2 Pages

The Law is many things: absolute, necessary, unyielding. The Law should be many things: fair, moral, for the common good. There exists, however, a disconnect between what The Law is and what The Law should be. Every law is absolute. Not every law is moral. As Henry David Thoreau points out in his Civil Disobedience, without making moral distinctions when following the state, citizens “are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God”. Throughout the history of the United States, there has existed plenty of laws that stood alone, supported by neither fairness nor morality, upright and singular; judicatory in its most tyrannical form. The Fugitive Slave Act, Jim Crow Laws, The Chinese Exclusion Act, Executive Order 9066 of Japanese …show more content…

By definition, it cannot jeopardize the legal system because by accepting the consequences of dissent, one is complying with the law. How can one comply with the system and jeopardize it at the same time? If by complying with the system, a citizen jeopardizes it, that is no fault on behalf of the citizen, that is the system toppling itself. Leibman’s labeling of civil disobedience as at best deplorable and at worst destructive is also false. He derives these adjectives from his fear that “organized disobedience of masses stirs up the primitive”, comparing the possible passion that civil disobedience could stir up to that of lynch mobs. Sure, there are examples of cases of civil disobedience gone awry, a recent case being the protest against Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley turning violent despite initiating peacefully. Is that enough to label civil disobedience deplorable/destructive? Considering that in any occasion, the cause for civil disobedience would be an unjust law, wouldn’t it be shortsighted to blame all of the “stirring up of the primitive” on disobedience instead of the actual unjust law? That would be akin to crediting the rise of Malcolm X’s sometimes violent ideologies to Dr. King’s encouragement of peaceful disobedience. Malcolm X’s radical ideas didn’t gain traction because of Dr. King; they climbed because of

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