Civil Disobedience Argumentative

Website/Essay Assignment
The United States has a long history of civil disobedience. Henry David
Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote Resistance to Civil Government, which challenged, among other things, the unjust yet
legal system of American Slavery. Thoreaus work has influenced generations of thinkers, protesters, and
conscientious objectors, including Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, and a group of Roman Catholic peace
activists known as the Catonsville Nine. Other famous practitioners of civil disobedience include Dorothy Day
(1897-1980), founder of the Catholic Workers Movement and a champion of the dispossessed, and Cesar Chavez
(1927-1993), a son of migrant workers and founder of the United Farm Workers Union; both used non-violent, yet
often illegal, means to draw attention to their causes and create change in institutional policies.

The purpose for each of these acts of civil disobedience is to bring attention to social issues and to spur social
change.

Your Task: Create an argumentative

website that responds to the following
prompt:

Is civil disobedience a moral

responsibility of every citizen?

In groups of 3-4, your task will be to take a position on the prompt and make clear the reasons for that position
(there should be 3 reasons) This will become your thesis (ex. Civil disobedience is the moral responsibility of every
citizen because it _______________, ________________ & _______________.)

Ultimately, your project will be an outline of an argumentative essay, so it must follow the same structure as would
an argumentative paper.

Below, you will find several articles and a video link. Use these, those that we read in class and any other
reputable source that you find useful to support your position.

Bringing Down an Empire: Gandhi and Civil Disobedience

From On Civil Disobedience, by Mohandas Gandhi
On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience by Ronald Dworkin 1968
Fast-Food Workers Seeking $15 Wage Are Planning Civil Disobedience
Opting Haven out of the state-mandated tests is our familys act of civil disobedience
With Mass Civil Disobedience, Young Activists March Against Broken System
Civil Disobedience Defined The King Center
Civil Disobedience Peter Suber
A history of civil disobedience MSNBC (video)
Heres why were committing civil disobedience: Millennials can no longer be silent about our broken
system
DUE DATE: OCTOBER 23
PRESENTATIONS WILL BE ON 10/23 & 10/24
USE WEEBLY OR WIX TO CREATE YOUR WEBSITE
Each tab / page must be labeled, appropriately

Requirements Points Poss.

Must have a home page titled Civil Disobedience, a representative illustration and the 15
group members names

Background on civil disobedience (DO NOT COPY AND PASTE YOU NEED TO READ INFO 20
AND PUT IT INTO YOUR OWN WORDS THIS SHOULD BE AT LEAST 15 SENTENCES)

Thesis (subject, opinion, 3 reasons/issues/topics) 25

Topic #1 with 2 quotes that support the topic (include MLA citations for each quote) 20
Each quote must be followed by an explanation that shows how it supports your point
(use persuasive diction in your explanation)
Topic #2 with 2 quotes that support the topic 20
Each quote must be followed by an explanation that shows how it supports your point
(use persuasive diction in your explanation)
Topic #3 with 2 quotes that support the topic 20
Each quote must be followed by an explanation that shows how it supports your point
(use persuasive diction in your explanation)
1 Opposing argument & 1 refutation /negation (must be a fact) 20
(USE T-CHART FORMAT)
Concluding points (summarizes each point discussed) and call to action 20

Properly formatted MLA works cited page 20

Each slide must have an illustration (these must also be cited) 15

Must use at least 7 sources 35

Creativity / Design 20
PLEASE USE 16 POINT FONT / DONT USE COLORS THAT ARE DIFFICULT TO SEE
Grammar 20

TOTAL 270
VIDEO: http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/a-history-of-civil-disobedience-424612419889

http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/4733

Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience is the active, public, conscientious breach of the law to bring about a change in law or public
policy. Henry David Thoreau coined the term in 1848 in his essay about his refusal as an abolitionist to pay the poll
tax. Thoreau argued that citizens ought deliberately to break laws that conflict with their moral beliefs.

Gandhi used nonviolent civil disobedience to protest racial pass laws in South Africa and in Indias independence
struggle, including the famous Salt March against the British monopoly on salt. Dr. King and others made civil
disobedience a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement, defying Jim Crow laws through sit-ins, violating laws and
court orders prohibiting marches and boycotts, and accepting jail sentences to highlight racial injustice. In his Letter
from Birmingham Jail, King explains the moral arguments for civil disobedience and distinguishes between just and
unjust laws.
 Bringing Down an Empire: Gandhi and Civil
Disobedience
http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-16-3-b-bringing-down-an-empire-gandhi-and-civil-disobedience

Gandhi led the movement for independence in India by using non-violent civil disobedience. His tactics drove the
British from India, but he failed to wipe out ancient Indian religious and caste hatreds.

Naturally shy and retiring, Mohandas K. Gandhi was a small, frail man with a high-pitched voice. He didn't seem like
a person destined to lead millions of Indians in their battle for independence from the British Empire . And the
tactics that he insisted his followers use in this strugglenon-violent civil disobedience seemed unlikely to drive a
powerful empire from India.

Gandhi was born into a Hindu merchant caste family in 1869. He was the youngest child. His father was the chief
minister of an Indian province and showed great skill in maneuvering between British and Indian leaders. Growing
up, Gandhi exhibited none of his father's interest in or skill at politics. Instead, he was heavily influenced by
the Hinduism and Jainism of his devoutly religious mother. She impressed on him beliefs in non-violence,
vegetarianism, fasting for purification, and respect for all religions. "Religions are different roads converging upon
the same point," he once said.

In 1888, Gandhi sailed for England where, following the advice of his father, he studied to become a lawyer. When
he returned to India three years later, he took a job representing an Indian ship-trading company that was involved
in a complicated lawsuit in South Africa.

Traveling to South Africa in 1893, Gandhi soon discovered that the ruling white Boers, descendants of Dutch
settlers, discriminated against the dark-skinned Indians who had been imported as laborers. Gandhi himself
experienced this discrimination when railroad officials ordered him to sit in a third-class coach at the back of a train
even though he had purchased a first-class ticket. Gandhi refused the order and police forced him off the train.

This event changed his life. Gandhi soon became an outspoken critic of South Africa's discrimination policies. This
so angered the Boer population that at one point a white mob almost lynched him.

At the turn of the century, the British fought the Boers over control of South Africa with its rich gold and diamond
mines. Gandhi sympathized with the Boers, but sided with Britain because he then believed that the British Empire
";existed for the benefit of the world." Britain won the war, but much of the governing of South Africa remained in
the hands of the Boers.

In 1907, the Boer legislature passed a law requiring that all Indians register with the police and be fingerprinted.
Gandhi, along with many other Indians, refused to obey this law. He was arrested and put in jail, the first of many
times he would be imprisoned for disobeying what he believed to be unjust laws.

While in jail, Gandhi read the essay "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American writer.
Gandhi adopted the term "civil disobedience" to describe his strategy of non-violently refusing to cooperate with
injustice, but he preferred the Sanskrit word satyagraha (devotion to truth). Following his release from jail, he
continued to protest the registration law by supporting labor strikes and organizing a massive non-violent march.
Finally, the Boer government agreed to a compromise that ended the most objectionable parts of the registration
law.

Having spent more than 20 years in South Africa, Gandhi decided that his remaining life's work awaited him in India.
As he left South Africa in 1914, the leader of the Boer government remarked, The saint has left our shores, I
sincerely hope forever."
Civil Disobedience in India

When Gandhi returned to India, he was already a hero in his native land. He had abandoned his western clothing
for the simple homespun dress of the poor people. This was his way of announcing that the time had come for
Indians to assert their independence from British domination. He preached to the Indian masses to spin and weave
in lieu of buying British cloth.

The British had controlled India since about the time of the American Revolution. Gaining independence would be
difficult, because Indians were far from united. Although most Indians were Hindus, a sizeable minority
were Muslims . The relationship between the two groups was always uneasy and sometimes violent.

One of Britain's main economic interests in India was to sell its manufactured cloth to the Indian people. As Britain
flooded India with cheap cotton textiles, the village hand-spinning and weaving economy in India was crippled.
Millions of Indians were thrown out of work and into poverty.

Gandhi struggled throughout his life against what he considered three great evils afflicting India. One was British
rule, which Gandhi believed impoverished the Indian people by destroying their village-based cloth-making
industry. The second evil was Hindu-Muslim disunity caused by years of religious hatred. The last evil was the Hindu
tradition of classifying millions of Indians as a caste of "untouchables". Untouchables, those Indians born into the
lowest social class, faced severe discrimination and could only practice the lowest occupations.

In 1917, while Britain was fighting in World War I , Gandhi supported peasants protesting unfair taxes imposed by
wealthy landowners in the Bihar province in northeastern India. Huge crowds followed him wherever he went.
Gandhi declared that the peasants were living "under a reign of terror." British officials ordered Gandhi to leave the
province, which he refused to do. "I have disregarded the order," he explained, "in obedience to the higher law of
our being, the voice of conscience."

The British arrested Gandhi and put him on trial. But under pressure from Gandhi's crowds of supporters, British
authorities released him and eventually abolished the unjust tax system. Gandhi later said, "I declared that the
British could not order me around in my own country."

Despite his differences with Britain, Gandhi actually supported the recruitment of Indian soldiers to help the British
war effort. He believed that Britain would return the favor by granting independence to India after the war.

Gandhi Against the Empire

Instead of granting India independence after World War I, Britain continued its colonial regime and tightened
restrictions on civil liberties. Gandhi responded by calling for strikes and other acts of peaceful civil disobedience.
During one protest assembly held in defiance of British orders, colonial troops fired into the crowd, killing more
than 350 people. A British general then carried out public floggings and a humiliating "crawling order." This
required Indians to crawl on the ground when approached by a British soldier.

The massacre and crawling order turned Gandhi against any further cooperation with the British government. In
August 1920, he urged Indians to withdraw their children from British-run schools, boycott the law courts, quit their
colonial government jobs, and continue to refuse to buy imported cloth. Now called "Mahatma," meaning "Great
Soul," Gandhi spoke to large crowds throughout the country. "We in India in a moment," he proclaimed, "realize
that 100,000 Englishmen need not frighten 300 million human beings."

Many answered Gandhi's call. But as the movement spread, Indians started rioting in some places. Gandhi called for
order and canceled the massive protest. He drew heavy criticism from fellow nationalists, but Gandhi would only
lead a non-violent movement.
In 1922, the British arrested Gandhi for writing articles advocating resistance to colonial rule. He used his day in
court to indict the British Empire for its exploitation and impoverishment of the Indian people. "In my humble
opinion," he declared at his trial, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good." The
British judge sentenced him to six years in prison.

When he was released after two years, Gandhi remained determined to continue his struggle against British
colonial rule. He also decided to campaign against Hindu-Muslim religious hatred and Hindu mistreatment of the
so-called untouchables, whom he called the Children of God. In Gandhi's mind, all of these evils had to be erased if
India were to be free.

In 1930, Gandhi carried out his most spectacular act of civil disobedience. At that time, British colonial law made it a
crime for anyone in India to possess salt not purchased from the government monopoly. In defiance of British
authority, Gandhi led thousands of people on a 240-mile march to the sea where he picked up a pinch of salt. This
sparked a mass movement among the people all over the country to gather and make their own salt.

Gandhi was arrested and jailed, but his followers marched to take over the government salt works. Colonial troops
attacked the marchers with clubs. But true to Gandhi's principle of non-violence, the protesters took the blows
without striking back. Gandhi explained, I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might.

Gandhi now held the attention of the world, which pressured the British to negotiate with Indian leaders on a plan
for self-rule. The British, however, stalled the process by making proposals that aggravated Indian caste and
religious divisions.

The Mahatma decided that he had to do everything he could to eliminate Hindu prejudice and discrimination
against the untouchables if India were ever to become a truly free nation. In 1932, he announced a fast unto death"
as part of his campaign to achieve equality for this downtrodden caste. Gandhi ended his fast when some progress
was made toward this goal, but he never achieved full equality for the Children of God."

Gandhi also dreamed of a united as well as a free India. But distrust between the two factions led to increasing calls
for partitioning India into separate Hindu and Muslim homelands.

Independence and Assassination

During World War II , colonial officials cracked down on a movement calling for the British to "Quit India." They
imprisoned Gandhi and many other Indians until the end of the war. Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill,
declared, "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

When the British people voted out Churchill's government in 1945, Indian independence became inevitable. But the
problem was how the Hindu majority and Muslim minority would share power in India. Distrust spilled over into
violence between the two religious groups as the Muslims demanded a separate part of India for their own nation,
which they would call Pakistan.

Disheartened by the religious hatred and violence, Gandhi spoke to both Hindus and Muslims, encouraging peace
and forgiveness. He opposed dividing the country into Hindu and Muslim nations, believing in one unified India.

Finally, in May 1947, British, Muslim, and Hindu political leaders reached an agreement for independence that
Gandhi did not support. The agreement created a Hindu-dominated India and a Muslim Pakistan. As Independence
Day (August 15, 1947) approached, an explosion of Hindu and Muslim looting, rape, and murder erupted
throughout the land. Millions of Hindus and Muslims fled their homes, crossing the borders into India or Pakistan.

Gandhi traveled to the areas of violence, trying to calm the people. In January 1948, he announced that he would
fast until a reunion of hearts of all communities had been achieved. At age 78, he weakened rapidly. But he did not
break his fast until Hindu and Muslim leaders came to him pledging peace.
On January 30, 1948, an assassin shot and killed the Great Soul of India while he was attending a prayer meeting.
The assassin was a Hindu who believed Gandhi had sold out to the Muslims.

Sadly, the peace he had brokered between Hindus and Muslims did not last. The ancient hatreds remained. War
has erupted between India and Pakistan several times, and the two countries remain hostile to one another to this
day.

Who was Mahatma Gandhi? He was a physically small man with a big idea who achieved great things. He worked
for the dignity of Indians in South Africa, struggled for Indian independence, and inspired others like Martin Luther
King Jr. in the United States to confront injustice with non-violent methods. It is the acid test of non-violence,
Gandhi once said, that in a non-violent conflict there is no rancor left behind and, in the end, the enemies are
converted into friends.

For Discussion and Writing

1. What non-violent methods did Gandhi use in South Africa and India to achieve his goals?
2. How did Gandhi justify breaking the law in his civil disobedience campaigns? Do you agree with him? Explain.
3. When, if ever, do you think non-violent civil disobedience is justified?
4. Although Gandhi never used or advocated violence, he did not absolutely oppose it. I do believe that where there is
only a choice between cowardice and violence, he wrote, I would advise violence. Describe a situation where you
think Gandhi might agree that resorting to violence was necessary.

For Further Information

Non-Violent Resistance And Social Transformation: A highly informative web site describing the importance of civil
disobedience to Gandhi.

ACTIVITY

Non-violent Civil Disobedience

Since Gandhi, many individuals and groups have employed non-violent civil disobedience. The question has often arisen whether the civil
disobedience was justified. In this activity, students examine various situations and tell whether the situation calls for civil disobedience.

1. Form small groups.

2. Each group should discuss each of the situations below. For each, the group should decide two issues:
1. Does the situation justify non-violent civil disobedience? Explain.
2. If so, what action would you recommend for those seeking to change the situation? If not, what action would you
recommend? Explain.
3. Call on groups to report their decisions and reasons for them.

Situations

1. In 1955, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered all schools desegregated, most public facilitieshotels, restrooms, water
fountains, etc.remained rigidly segregated in the South. African Americans were demanding full integration.
2. In 1964 at the University of California in Berkeley, university rules banned all political or religious speakers, fund raising, or
recruitment from the campus unless first approved by the campus administration. Students were demanding to exercise what they
consider their First Amendment rights to speak out on issues, raise funds for causes, and recruit members of political and religious
organizations.
3. In 1967, America was deeply involved in the Vietnam War. Many people believed the war was wrong and demanded that the
troops be brought home.
4. In its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the U. S. Supreme Court in effect legalized abortion in America. Many people today believe
abortion is murder and it should be stopped.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/06/06/on-not-prosecuting-civil-disobedience/

On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience

Ronald Dworkin
JUNE 6, 1968 ISSUE
How should the government deal with those who disobey the draft laws out of conscience? Many people think the
answer is obvious: the government must prosecute the dissenters, and if they are convicted it must punish them.
Some people reach this conclusion easily, because they hold the mindless view that conscientious disobedience is
the same as lawlessness. They think that the dissenters are anarchists who must be punished before their
corruption spreads. Many lawyers and intellectuals come to the same conclusion, however, on what looks like a
more sophisticated argument. They recognize that disobedience to law may be morally justified, but they insist that
it cannot be legally justified, and they think that it follows from this truism that the law must be enforced. Erwin
Griswold, the Solicitor General of the United States, and the former dean of the Harvard Law School, appears to
have adopted this view in a recent statement. [It] is of the essence of law, he said, that it is equally applied to all,
that it binds all alike, irrespective of personal motive. For this reason, one who contemplates civil disobedience out
of moral conviction should not be surprised and must not be bitter if a criminal conviction ensues. And he must
accept the fact that organized society cannot endure on any other basis.

The New York Times applauded that statement. A thousand faculty members of several universities had signed
a Times advertisement calling on the Justice Department to quash the indictments of the Rev. William Sloane
Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber, for conspiring to counsel
various draft offenses. The Times said that the request to quash the indictments confused moral rights with legal
responsibilities.

But the argument that, because the government believes a man has committed a crime, it must prosecute him is
much weaker than it seems. Society cannot endure if it tolerates all disobedience; it does not follow, however,
nor is there evidence, that it will collapse if it tolerates some. In the United States prosecutors have discretion
whether to enforce criminal laws in particular cases. A prosecutor may properly decide not to press charges if the
lawbreaker is young, or inexperienced, or the sole support of a family, or is repentant, or turns states evidence, or
if the law is unpopular or unworkable or generally disobeyed, or if the courts are clogged with more important
cases, or for dozens of other reasons. This discretion is not licensewe expect prosecutors to have good reasons
for exercising itbut there are, at least prima facie, some good reasons for not prosecuting those who disobey the
draft laws out of conscience. One is the obvious reason that they act out of better motives than those who break
the law out of greed or a desire to subvert government. Another is the practical reason that our society suffers a
loss if it punishes a group that includesas the group of draft dissenters doessome of its most thoughtful and
loyal citizens. Jailing such men solidifies their alienation from society, and alienates many like them who are
deterred by the threat.

THOSE WHO THINK that conscientious draft offenders should always be punished must show that these are not
good reasons for exercising discretion, or they must find contrary reasons that outweigh them What arguments
might they produce? There are practical reasons for enforcing the draft laws, and I shall consider some of these
later. But Dean Griswold and those who agree with him seem to rely on a fundamental moral argument that it
would be unfair, not merely impractical, to let the dissenters go unpunished. They think it would be unfair, I gather,
because society could not function if everyone disobeyed laws he disapproved of or found disadvantageous. If the
government tolerates those few who will not play the game, it allows them to secure the benefits of everyone
elses deference to law, without shouldering the burdens, such as the burden of the draft.

This argument is a serious one. It cannot be answered simply by saying that the dissenters would allow everyone
else the privilege of disobeying a law he believed immoral. In fact, few draft dissenters would accept a changed
society in which sincere segregationists were free to break civil rights laws they hated. The majority want no such
change, in any event, because they think that society would be worse off for it; until they are shown this is wrong,
they will expect their officials to punish anyone who assumes a privilege which they, for the general benefit, do not
assume.

There is, however, a flaw in the argument. The reasoning contains a hidden assumption that makes it almost
entirely irrelevant to the draft cases, and indeed to any serious case of civil disobedience in the United States. The
argument assumes that the dissenters know that they are breaking a valid law, and that the privilege they assert is
the privilege to do that. Of course, almost everyone who discusses civil disobedience recognizes that in America a
law may be invalid because it is unconstitutional. But the critics handle this complexity by arguing on separate
hypotheses: If the law is invalid, then no crime is committed, and society may not punish. If the law is valid, then no
crime has been committed, and society must punish. This reasoning hides the crucial fact that the validity of the law
may be doubtful. The officials and judges may believe that the law is valid, the dissenters may disagree, and both
sides may have plausible arguments for their positions. If so, then the issues are different from what they would be
if the law were clearly valid or clearly invalid, and the argument of fairness, designed for these alternatives, is
irrelevant.

DOUBTFUL LAW is by no means special or exotic in cases of civil disobedience. On the contrary. In the United
States, at least, almost any law which a significant number of people would be tempted to disobey on moral
grounds would be doubtfulif not clearly invalidon constitutional grounds as well. The constitution makes our
conventional political morality relevant to the question of validity; any statute that appears to compromise that
morality raises constitutional questions, and if the compromise is serious, the constitutional doubts are serious
also.

The connection between moral and legal issues is especially clear in the current draft cases. Dissent has largely
been based on the following moral objections: (a) The United States is using immoral weapons and tactics in
Vietnam. (b) The war has never been endorsed by deliberate, considered, and open vote of the peoples
representatives. (c) The United States has no interest at stake in Vietnam remotely strong enough to justify forcing
a segment of its citizens to risk death there. (d) If an army is to be raised to fight that war, it is immoral to raise it by
a draft that defers or exempts college students, and thus discriminates against the economically underprivileged.
(e) The draft exempts those who object to all wars on religious grounds, but not those who object to particular wars
on moral grounds; there is no relevant difference between these positions, and so the draft, by making the
distinction, implies that the second group is less worthy of the nations respect than the first. (f) The law that makes
it a crime to counsel draft resistance stifles those who oppose the war, because it is morally impossible to argue
that the war is profoundly immoral, without encouraging and assisting those who refuse to fight it.

Lawyers will recognize that these moral positions, if we accept them, provide the basis for the following
constitutional arguments: (a) The constitution makes treaties part of the law of the land, and the United States is a
party to international conventions and covenants that make illegal the acts of war the dissenters charge the nation
with committing. (b) The constitution provides that Congress must declare war; the legal issue of whether our
action in Vietnam is a war and whether the Tonkin Bay Resolution was a declaration is the heart of the moral
issue of whether the government has made a deliberate and open decision. (c) Both the due process clause of the
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment condemn special
burdens placed on a selected class of citizens when the burden or the classification is not reasonable; the burden is
unreasonable when it patently does not serve the public interest, or when it is vastly disproportionate to the
interest served. If our military action in Vietnam is frivolous or perverse, as the dissenters claim, then the burden
we place on men of draft age is unreasonable and unconstitutional. (d) In any event, the discrimination in favor of
college students denies to the poor the equal protection of the law that is guaranteed by the constitution. (e) If
there is no pertinent difference between religious objection to all wars and moral objection to some wars, then the
classification the draft makes is arbitrary and unreasonable, and unconstitutional on that ground. The
establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment forbids governmental pressure in favor of organized
religion; if the drafts distinction coerces men in this direction, it is invalid on that count also. (f) The First
Amendment also condemns invasions of freedom of speech. If the draft laws prohibition on counseling does inhibit
expression of a range of views on the war, it abridges free speech.
The principal counterargument, supporting the view that the courts ought not to hold the draft unconstitutional,
also involves moral issues. Under the so-called political question doctrine, the courts deny their own jurisdiction
to pass on matterssuch as foreign or military policywhose resolution is best assigned to other branches of the
government. The Boston court trying the Coffin, Spock case has already declared, on the basis of this doctrine, that
it will not hear arguments about the legality of the war. But the Supreme Court has shown itself (in the
reapportionment cases, for example) reluctant to refuse jurisdiction when it believed that the gravest issues of
political morality were at stake and that no remedy was available through the political process. If the dissenters are
right, and the war and the draft are state crimes of profound injustice to a group of citizens, then the argument that
the courts must refuse jurisdiction is considerably weakened.

WE CANNOT CONCLUDE from these arguments that the draft (or any part of it) is unconstitutional. If the Supreme
Court is called upon to rule on the question, it will probably reject some of them, and refuse to consider the others
on grounds that they are political. The majority of lawyers would probably agree with this result. But the arguments
of unconstitutionality are at least plausible, and a reasonable and competent lawyer might well think that they
present a stronger case, on balance, than the counterarguments. If he does, he will consider that the draft is not
constitutional, and there will be no way of proving that he is wrong.

Therefore we cannot assume, in judging what to do with the draft dissenters, that they are asserting a privilege to
disobey valid laws. We cannot decide that fairness demands their punishment until we try to answer the further
question: What should a citizen do when the law is unclear, and when he thinks it allows what others think it does
not? I do not mean to ask, of course, what it is legally proper for him to do, or what his legal rights arethat would
be begging the question, because it depends upon whether he is right or they are right. I mean to ask what his
proper course is as a citizen, what in other words, we would consider to be playing the game. That is a crucial
question, because it cannot be wrong not to punish him if he is acting as, given his opinions, we think he should.1

There is no obvious answer on which most citizens would readily agree, and that is itself significant. If we examine
our legal institutions and practices, however, we shall discover some relevant underlying principles and policies. I
shall set out three possible answers to the question, and then try to show which of these best fits our practices and
expectations. The three possibilities I want to consider are these:

(1) If the law is doubtful, and it is therefore unclear whether it permits someone to do what he wants, he should
assume the worst, and act on the assumption that it does not. He should obey the executive authorities who
command him, even though he thinks they are wrong, while using the political process, if he can, to change the law.

(2) If the law is doubtful, he may follow his own judgment, that is, he may do what he wants if he believes that the
case that the law permits this is stronger than the case that it does not. But he may follow his own judgment only
until an authoritative institution, like a court, decides the other way in a case involving him or someone else. Once
an institutional decision has been reached, he must abide by that decision, even though he thinks that it was
wrong. (There are, in theory many subdivisions of this second possibility. We may say that the individuals choice is
foreclosed by the contrary decision of any court, including the lowest court in the system if the case is not
appealed. Or we may require a decision of some particular court or institution. I shall discuss this second possibility
in its most liberal form, namely that the individual may properly follow his own judgment until a contrary decision
of the highest court competent to pass on the issue, which, in the case of the draft, is the United States Supreme
Court.)

(3) If the law is doubtful, he may follow his own judgment, even after a contrary decision by the highest competent
court. Of course, he must take the contrary decision of any court into account in making his judgment of what the
law requires. Otherwise the judgment would not be an honest or reasonable one, because the doctrine of
precedent, which is an established part of our legal system, has the effect of allowing the decision of the courts
to change the law. Suppose, for example, that a taxpayer believes that he is not required to pay tax on certain
forms of income. If the Supreme Court decides to the contrary, he should, taking into account the practice of
according great weight to the decisions of the Supreme Court on tax matters, decide that the Courts decision has
itself tipped the balance, and that the law now requires him to pay the tax.
Someone might think that this qualification erases the difference between the third and the second models, but it
does not. The doctrine of precedent gives different weights to the decisions of different courts, and greatest weight
to the decisions of the Supreme Court, but it does not make the decision of any court conclusive. Sometimes, even
after a contrary Supreme Court decision, an individual may still reasonably believe that the law is on his side; such
cases are rare, but they are most likely in disputes over constitutional law when civil disobedience is involved. The
Court has shown itself more likely to overrule its past decisions if these have limited important personal or political
rights, and it is just these decisions that a dissenter might want to challenge.

We cannot assume, in other words, that the Constitution is always what the Supreme Court says it is. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, for example, did not follow such a rule in his famous dissent in the Gitlow case. A few years
before, in Abrams, he had lost his battle to persuade the court that the First Amendment protected an anarchist
who had been urging general strikes against the government. A similar issue was presented in Gitlow, and Holmes
once again dissented. It is true, he said, that in my opinion this criterion was departed from in [Abrams] but the
convictions that I expressed in that case are too deep for it to be possible for me as yet to believe that itsettled
the law. Holmes voted for acquitting Gitlow, on the ground that what Gitlow had done was no crime, even though
the Supreme Court had recently held that it was.

HERE THEN are three possible models for the behavior of dissenters who disagree with the executive authorities
when the law is doubtful. Which of them best fits our legal and social practices?

I think it plain that we do not follow the first of these models, that is, that we do not expect citizens to assume the
worst. It no court has decided the issue, and a man thinks, on balance, that the law is on his side, most of our
lawyers and critics think it perfectly proper for him to follow his own judgment. Even when many disapprove of
what he doessuch as peddling pornographythey do not think he must desist just because its legality is subject
to doubt.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider what society would lose if it did follow the first model or, to put the
matter the other way, what society gains when people follow their own judgment in cases like this. When the law is
uncertain, in the sense that lawyers can reasonably disagree on what a court ought to decide, the reason usually is
that different legal principles and policies have collided, and it is unclear how best to accommodate these
conflicting principles and policies.

Our practice, in which different parties are encouraged to pursue their own understanding, provides a means of
testing relevant hypotheses. If the question is whether a particular rule would have certain undesirable
consequences, or whether these consequences would have limited or broad ramifications, then, before the issue is
decided, it is useful to know what does in fact take place when some people proceed on that rule. (Much anti-trust
and business regulation law has developed through this kind of testing.) If the question is whether and to what
degree a particular solution would offend principles of justice or fair play deeply respected by the community, it is
useful, again, to experiment by testing the communitys response. The extent of community indifference to anti-
contraception laws, for example, would never have become established had not some organizations deliberately
flouted those laws in Connecticut.

If the first model were followed, we would lose the advantages of these tests. The law would suffer, particularly if
this model were applied to constitutional issues. When the validity of a criminal statute is in doubt, the statute will
almost always strike some people as being unfair or unjust, because it will infringe some principle of liberty or
justice or fairness which they take to be built into the Constitution. If our practice were that whenever a law is
doubtful on these grounds, one must act as if it were valid, then the chief vehicle we have for challenging the law
on moral grounds would be lost, and over time the law we obeyed would certainly become less fair and just, and
the liberty of our citizens would certainly be diminished.

We would lose almost as much if we used a variation of the first model, that a citizen must assume the worst unless
he can anticipate that the courts will agree with his view of the law. If everyone deferred to his guess of what the
courts would do, society and its law would be poorer. Our assumption in rejecting the first model was that the
record a citizen makes in following his own judgment, together with the arguments he makes supporting that
judgment when he has the opportunity, are helpful in creating the best judicial decision possible. This remains true
even when, at the time the citizen acts, the odds are against his success in court. We must remember, too, that the
value of the citizens example is not exhausted once the decision has been made. Our practices require that the
decision be criticized, by the legal profession and the law schools, and the record of dissent may be invaluable here.

Of course a man must consider what the courts will do when he decides whether it would be prudent to follow his
own judgment. He may have to face jail, bankruptcy, or opprobrium if he does. But it is essential that we separate
the calculation of prudence from the question of what, as a good citizen, he may properly do. We are investigating
how society ought to treat him when its courts believe that he judged wrong; therefore we must ask what he is
justified in doing when his judgment differs from others. We beg the question if we assume that what he may
properly do depends on his guess as to how society will treat him.

WE MUST ALSO REJECT the second model, that if the law is unclear a citizen may properly follow his own judgment
until the highest court has ruled that he is wrong. This fails to take into account the fact that any court, including
the Supreme Court, may overrule itself. In 1940 the Court decided that a West Virginia law requiring students to
salute the Flag was constitutional. In 1943 it reversed itself, and decided that such a statute was unconstitutional
after all. What was the duty, as citizens, of those people who in 1941 and 1942 objected to saluting the Flag on
grounds of conscience, and thought that the Courts 1940 decision was wrong? We can hardly say that their duty
was to follow the first decision. They believed that saluting the Flag was unconscionable, and they believed,
reasonably, that no valid law required them to do so. The Supreme Court later decided that in this they were right.
The Court did not simply hold that after the second decision failing to salute would not be a crime; it held (as in a
case like this it almost always would) that it was no crime after the first decision either.

Some will say that the flag-salute dissenters should have obeyed the Courts first decision, while they worked in the
legislatures to have the law repealed, and tried in the courts to find some way to challenge the law again without
actually violating it. That would be, perhaps, a plausible recommendation if conscience were not involved, because
it would then be arguable that the gain in orderly procedure was worth the personal sacrifice of patience. But
conscience was involved, and if the dissenters had obeyed the law while biding their time, they would have
suffered the irreparable injury of having done what their conscience forbade them to do. It is one thing to say that
an individual must sometimes violate his conscience when he knows that the law commands him to do it. It is quite
another to say that he must violate his conscience even when he reasonably believes that the law does not require
it, because it would inconvenience his fellow citizens if he took the most direct, and perhaps the only, method of
attempting to show that he is right and they are wrong.

Since a court may overrule itself, the same reasons we listed for rejecting the first model count against the second
as well. If we did not have the pressure of dissent, we would not have a dramatic statement of the degree to which
a court decision against the dissenter is felt to be wrong, a demonstration that is surely pertinent to the question of
whether it was right. We would increase the chance of being governed by rules that offend the principles we claim
to serve.

These considerations force us, I think, from the second model, but some will want to substitute a variation of it.
They will argue that once the Supreme Court has decided that a criminal law is valid, then citizens have a duty to
abide by that decision until they have a reasonable belief, not merely that the decision is bad law, but that the
Supreme Court is likely to overrule it. Under this view the West Virginia dissenters who refused to salute the Flag in
1942 were acting properly, because they might reasonably have anticipated that the Court would change its mind.
But if the Court were to hold the draft laws constitutional, it would be improper to continue to challenge these
laws, because there would be no great likelihood that the Court would soon change its mind. This suggestion must
also be rejected, however. For once we say that a citizen may properly follow his own judgment of the law, in spite
of his judgment that the courts will probably find against him, there is no plausible reason why he should act
differently because a contrary decision is already on the books.
THUS THE THIRD MODEL, or something close to it, seems to be the fairest statement of a mans social duty in our
community. A citizens allegiance is to the law, not to any particular persons view of what the law is, and he does
not behave improperly or unfairly so long as he proceeds on his own considered and reasonable view of what the
law requires. Let me repeat (because it is crucial) that this is not the same as saying that an individual may disregard
what the courts have said. The doctrine of precedent lies near the core of our legal system, and no one can make a
reasonable effort to follow the law unless he grants the courts the general power to alter it by their decisions. But if
the issue is one touching fundamental personal or political rights, and it is arguable that the Supreme Court has
made a mistake, a man is within his social rights in refusing to accept that decision as conclusive.

One large question remains before we can apply these observations to the problems of draft resistance. I have
been talking about the case of a man who believes that the law is not what other people think, or what the courts
have held. This description may fit some of those who disobey the draft laws out of conscience, but it does not fit
most of them. Most of the dissenters are not lawyers or political philosophers; they believe that the laws on the
books are immoral, and inconsistent with their countrys legal ideals, but they have not considered the question of
whether they may be invalid as well. Of what relevance to their situation, then, is the proposition that one may
properly follow ones own view of the law?

To answer this, I shall have to return to the point I made earlier. The Constitution, through the due process clause,
the equal protection clause, the First Amendment, and the other provisions I mentioned, injects an extraordinary
amount of our political morality into the issue of whether a law is valid. The statement that most draft dissenters
are unaware that the law is invalid therefore needs qualification. They hold beliefs that, if true, strongly support the
view that the law is on their side; the fact that they have not reached that further conclusion can be traced, in at
least most cases, to their lack of legal sophistication. If we believe that when the law is doubtful people who follow
their own judgment of the law may be acting properly, it would seem wrong not to extend that view to those
dissenters whose judgments come to the same thing. No part of the case that I made for the third model would
entitle us to distinguish them from their more knowledgeable colleagues.

We can draw several tentative conclusions from the argument so far: When the law is uncertain, in the sense that a
plausible case can be made on both sides, then a citizen who follows his own judgment is not behaving unfairly. Our
practices permit and encourage him to follow his own judgment in such cases. For that reason, our government has
a special responsibility to try to protect him, and soften his predicament, whenever it can do so without great
damage to other policies. It does not follow that the government can guarantee him immunityit cannot adopt the
rule that it will prosecute no one who acts out of conscience, or convict no one who reasonably disagrees with the
courts. That would paralyze the governments ability to carry out its policies; it would, moreover, throw away the
most important benefit of following the third model. If the state never prosecuted, then the courts could not act on
the experience and the arguments the dissent has generated. But it does follow from the governments
responsibility that when the practical reasons for prosecuting are relatively weak in a particular case, or can be met
in other ways, the path of fairness may lie in tolerance. The popular view that the law is the law and must always be
enforced refuses to distinguish the man who acts on his own judgment of a doubtful law, and thus behaves as our
practices provide, from the common criminal. I know of no reason, short of moral blindness, for not drawing a
distinction in principle between the two cases.

I ANTICIPATE a philosophical objection to these conclusions: that I am treating law as a brooding omnipresence in
the sky. I have spoken of people making judgments about what the law requires, even in cases in which the law is
unclear and undemonstrable. I have spoken of cases in which a man might think that the law requires one thing,
even though the Supreme Court has said that it requires another, and even when it was not likely that the Supreme
Court would soon change its mind. I will therefore be charged with the view that there is always a right answer to
a legal problem to be found in natural law or locked up in some transcendental strongbox.

The strongbox theory of law is, of course, nonsense. When I say that people hold views on the law when the law is
doubtful, and that these views are not merely predictions of what the courts will hold, I intend no such
metaphysics. I mean only to summarize as accurately as I can many of the practices that are part of our legal
process.
Lawyers and judges make statements of legal right and duty, even when they know these are not demonstrable,
and support them with arguments even when they know that these arguments will not appeal to everyone. They
make these arguments to one another, in the professional journals, in the classroom, and in the courts. They
respond to these arguments, when others make them, by judging them good or bad or mediocre. In so doing they
assume that some arguments for a given doubtful position are better than others. They also assume that the case
on one side of a doubtful proposition may be stronger than the case on the other, which is what I take a claim of
law in a doubtful case to mean. They distinguish, without too much difficulty, these arguments from predictions of
what the courts will decide.

These practices are poorly represented by the theory that judgments of law on doubtful issues are nonsense, or are
merely predictions of what the courts will do. Those who hold such theories cannot deny the fact of these practices;
perhaps these theorists mean that the practices are not sensible, because they are based on suppositions that do
not hold, or for some other reason. But this makes their objection mysterious, because they never specify what
they take the purposes underlying these practices to be; and unless these goals are specified, one cannot decide
whether the practices are sensible. I understand these underlying purposes to be those I described earlier: the
development and testing of the law through experimentation by citizens and through the adversary process.

Our legal system pursues these goals by inviting citizens to decide the strengths and weaknesses of legal arguments
for themselves, or through their own counsel, and to act on these judgments, although that permission is qualified
by the limited threat that they may suffer if the courts do not agree. Success in this strategy depends on whether
there is sufficient agreement within the community on what counts as a good or bad argument, so that, although
different people will reach different judgments, these differences will be neither so profound nor so frequent as to
make the system unworkable, or dangerous for those who act by their own lights. I believe there is sufficient
agreement on the criteria of the argument to avoid these traps, although one of the main tasks of legal philosophy
is to exhibit and clarify these criteria. In any event, the practices I have described have not yet been shown to be
misguided; they therefore must count in determining whether it is just and fair to be lenient to those who break
what others think is the law.

I HAVE SAID THAT the government has a special responsibility to those who act on a reasonable judgment that a
law is invalid. It should make accommodation for them as far as possible, when this is consistent with other policies.
It may be difficult to decide what the government ought to do, in the name of that responsibility, in particular
cases. The decision will be a matter of balance, and flat rules will not help. Still, some principles can be set out.

I shall start with the prosecutors decision whether to press charges. He must balance both his responsibility to be
lenient and the risk that convictions will rend the society, against the damage to the laws policy that may follow if
he leaves the dissenters alone. In making his calculation he must consider not only the extent to which others will
be harmed, but also how the law evaluates that harm; and he must therefore make the following distinction. Every
rule of law is supported, and presumably justified, by a set of policies it is supposed to advance and principles it is
supposed to respect. Some rules (the laws prohibiting murder and theft, for example) are supported by the
proposition that the individuals protected have a moral right to be free from the harm proscribed. Other rules (the
more technical anti-trust rules, for example) are not supported by any supposition of an underlying right; their
support comes chiefly from the alleged utility of the economic and social policies they promote. These may be
supplemented with moral principles (like the view that it is a harsh business practice to undercut a weak
competitors prices) but these fall short of recognizing a moral right against the harm in question.

The point of the distinction here is this: The judgment that someone has a moral right to be free from certain
injuries is a very strong form of moral judgment, because a moral right, once acknowledged, outweighs competing
claims of utility or virtue. When a law rests on such a judgment, that is a powerful argument against tolerating
violations which inflict those injuriesfor example, violations that involve personal injury or the destruction of
property. The prosecutor may respect the dissenters view that the law is invalid, but unless he agrees, he must
honor the laws judgment that others have an overriding claim of right.
IT MAY BE controversial, of course, whether a law rests on the assumption of a right. One must study the
background and administration of the law, and reflect on whether any social practices of right and obligation
support it. We may take one example in which the judgment is relatively easy. There are many sincere and ardent
segregationists who believe that the civil rights laws and decisions are unconstitutional, because they compromise
principles of local government and of freedom of association. This is an arguable, though not a persuasive, view.
But the constitutional provisions that support these laws clearly embody the view that Negroes, as individuals, have
a right not to be segregated. They do not rest simply on the judgment that national policies are best pursued by
preventing their segregation. If we take no action against the man who blocks the school house door, therefore, we
violate the rights, confirmed by law, of the schoolgirl he blocks. The responsibility of leniency cannot go this far.

The schoolgirls position is different, however, from that of the draftee who may be called up sooner or given a
more dangerous post if draft offenders are not punished. The draft laws do not reflect a judgment that a man has a
social or moral right to be drafted only after certain other men or groups have been called. The draft classifications,
and the order-of-call according to age within classifications, are arranged for social and administrative convenience.
They also reflect considerations of fairness, like the proposition that a mother who has lost one of two sons in war
ought not to be made to risk losing the other. But they presuppose no fixed rights. The draft boards are given
considerable discretion in the classification process, and the army, of course, has almost complete discretion in
assigning dangerous posts. If the prosecutor tolerates draft offenders, he makes small shifts in the laws
calculations of fairness and utility. These may cause disadvantage to others in the pool of draftees but that is a
different matter from contradicting their social or moral rights.

It is wrong therefore to analyze draft cases and segregation cases in the same way, as many critics do when
considering whether tolerance is justified. I do not mean that fairness to others is irrelevant in draft cases; it must
be taken into account, and balanced against fairness to dissenters and the long-term benefit to society. But it does
not play the commanding role here that it does in segregation cases, and in other cases when rights are at stake.

Where, then, does the balance of fairness and utility lie in the case of those who counsel draft resistance? If these
men had encouraged violence or otherwise trespassed on the rights of others, then there would be a strong case
for prosecution. But in the absence of such actions, the balance of fairness and utility seems to me to lie the other
way, and I therefore think that the decision to prosecute Coffin, Spock, Raskin, Goodman, and Ferber was wrong. It
may be argued that if those who counsel draft resistance are free from prosecution, the number who resist
induction will increase; but it will not, I think, increase much beyond the number of those who would resist in any
event.

If I am wrong, and there is much greater resistance, then a sense of this residual discontent is of importance to
policy makers, and it ought not to be hidden under a ban on speech. Conscience is deeply involvedit is hard to
believe that many who counsel resistance do so on any other grounds. The case is strong that the laws making
counseling a crime are unconstitutional; even those who do not find the case persuasive will admit that its
arguments have substance. The harm to potential draftees, both those who may be persuaded to resist and those
who may be called earlier because others have been persuaded, is remote and speculative.

The cases of men who refuse induction when drafted are more complicated. The crucial question is whether a
failure to prosecute will lead to wholesale refusals to serve. It may notthere are social pressures, including the
threat of career disadvantages, that would force many young Americans to serve if drafted, even if they knew they
would not go to jail if they refused. If the number would not much increase, then the state should leave the
dissenters alone, and I see no great harm in delaying any prosecution until the effect of that policy becomes clearer.
If the number of those who refuse induction turns out to be large, this would argue for prosecution. But it would
also make the problem academic, because if there were sufficient dissent to bring us to that pass, it would be most
difficult to pursue the war in any event, except under a near-totalitarian regime.

THERE MAY SEEM to be a paradox in these conclusions. I argued earlier that when the law is unclear citizens have
the right to follow their own judgment, partly on the grounds that this practice helps to shape issues for
adjudication; now I propose a course that eliminates or postpones adjudication. But the contradiction is only
apparent. It does not follow from the fact that our practice facilitates adjudication, and renders it more useful in
developing the law, that a trial should follow whenever citizens do act by their own lights. The question arises in
each case whether the issues are ripe for adjudication, and whether adjudication would settle these issues in a
manner that would decrease the chance of, or remove the grounds for, further dissent.

In the draft cases, the answer to both these questions is negative: There is much ambivalence about the war just
now, and uncertainty and ignorance about the scope of the moral issues involved in the draft. It is far from the best
time for a court to pass on these issues, and tolerating dissent for a time is one way of allowing the debate to
continue until it has produced something clearer. Moreover, it is plain that an adjudication of the constitutional
issues now will not settle the law. Those who have doubts whether the draft is constitutional will have the same
doubts even if the Supreme Court says that it is. This is one of those cases, touching fundamental rights, in which
our practices of precedent will encourage these doubts. Certainly this will be so if, as seems likely, the Supreme
Court appeals to the political question doctrine, and refuses to pass on the more serious constitutional issues.

Even if the prosecutor does not act, however, the underlying problem will be only temporarily relieved. So long as
the law appears to make acts of dissent criminal, a man of conscience will face danger. What can Congress, which
shares the responsibility of leniency, do to lessen this danger?

Congress can review the laws in question to see how much accommodation can be given the dissenters. Every
program a legislature adopts is a mixture of policies and restraining principles. We accept loss of efficiency in crime
detection and urban renewal, for example, so that we can respect the rights of accused criminals and compensate
property owners for their damages. Congress may properly defer to its responsibility toward the dissenters by
adjusting or compromising other policies. The relevant questions are these: What means can be found for allowing
the greatest possible tolerance of conscientious dissent while minimizing its impact on policy? How strong is the
governments responsibility for leniency in this casehow deeply is conscience involved, and how strong is the case
that the law is invalid after all? How important is the policy in questionis interference with that policy too great a
price to pay? These questions are no doubt too simple, but they suggest the heart of the choices that must be
made.

For the same reasons that those who counsel resistance should not be prosecuted, I think that the law that makes
this a crime should be repealed. The case is strong that this law abridges free speech. It certainly coerces
conscience, and it probably serves no beneficial effect. If counseling would persuade only a few to resist who
otherwise would not, the value of the restraint is small; if counseling would persuade many, that is an important
political fact that should be known.

The issues are more complex, again, in the case of draft resistance itself. Those who believe that the war in Vietnam
is itself a grotesque blunder will favor any change in the law that makes peace more likely. But if we take the
position of those who think the war is necessary, then we must admit that a policy that continues the draft but
wholly exempts dissenters would be unwise. Two less drastic alternatives might be considered, however: a
volunteer army, and an expanded conscientious objector category that includes those who find this war immoral.
There is much to be said against both proposals, but once the requirement of respect for dissent is recognized, the
balance of principle may be tipped in their favor.

SO THE CASE for not prosecuting conscientious draft offenders, and for changing the laws in their favor, is a strong
one. It would be unrealistic to expect this policy to prevail, however, for political pressures now oppose it.
Relatively few of those who have refused induction have been indicted so far, but the pace of prosecution is
quickening, and many more indictments are expected if the resistance many college seniors have pledged does in
fact develop. The Coffin, Spock trial continues, although when the present steps toward peace negotiation were
announced, many lawyers had hoped it would be dropped or delayed. There is no sign of any movement to amend
the draft laws in the way I have suggested.

We must consider, therefore, what the courts can and should now do. A court might, of course, uphold the
arguments that the draft laws are in some way unconstitutional, in general or as applied to the defendants in the
 case at hand. Or it may acquit the defendants because the facts necessary for conviction are not proved. I shall not
argue the constitutional issues, or the facts of any particular case. I want instead to suggest that a court ought not
to convict, at least in some circumstances, even if it sustains the statutes and finds the facts as charged. The
Supreme Court has not ruled on the chief arguments that the present draft is unconstitutional, nor has it held that
these arguments raise political questions that are not relevant to its jurisdiction. If the alleged violations take place
before the Supreme Court has decided these issues, and the case reaches that Court, there are strong reasons why
the Court should acquit even if it does then sustain the draft. It ought to acquit on the ground that before its
decision the validity of the draft was doubtful, and it is unfair to punish men for disobeying a doubtful law.

There would be precedent for a decision along these lines. The Court has several times reversed criminal
convictions, on due process grounds, because the law in question was too vague. (It has overturned convictions, for
example, under laws that made it a crime to charge unreasonable prices or to be a member of a gang.)
Conviction under a vague criminal law offends the moral and political ideals of due process in two ways. First, it
places a citizen in the unfair position of either acting at his peril or accepting a more stringent restriction on his life
than the legislature may have authorized: As I argued earlier, it is not acceptable, as a model of social behavior, that
in such cases he ought to assume the worst. Second, it gives power to the prosecutor and the courts to make
criminal law, by opting for one or the other possible interpretations after the event. This would be a delegation of
authority by the legislature that is inconsistent with our scheme of separation of powers.

Conviction under a criminal law whose terms are not vague, but whose constitutional validity is doubtful, offends
due process in the first of these ways. It forces a citizen to assume the worst, or act at his peril. It offends due
process in something like the second way as well. Most citizens would be deterred by a doubtful statute if they
were to risk jail by violating it. Congress, and not the courts, would then be the effective voice in deciding the
constitutionality of criminal enactments, and this also violates the separation of powers.

IF ACTS OF DISSENT continue to occur after the Supreme Court has ruled that the laws are valid, or that the political
question doctrine applies, then acquittal on the grounds I have described is no longer appropriate. The Courts
decision will not have finally settled the law, for the reasons given earlier, but the Court will have done all that can
be done to settle it. The courts may still exercise their sentencing discretion, however, and impose minimal or
suspended sentences as a mark of respect for the dissenters position.

Some lawyers will be shocked by my general conclusion that we have a responsibility toward those who disobey the
draft laws out of conscience, and that we may be required not to prosecute them, but rather to change our laws or
adjust our sentencing procedures to accommodate them. The simple Draconian propositions, that crime must be
punished, and that he who misjudges the law must take the consequences, have an extraordinary hold on the
professional as well as the popular imagination. But the rule of law is more complex and more intelligent than that
and it is important that it survive.

1. 1

I do not mean to imply that the government should always punish a man who deliberately breaks a law he knows
is valid. There may be reasons of fairness or practicality, like those I listed in the third paragraph, for not
prosecuting such men. But cases like the draft cases present special arguments for tolerance; I want to
concentrate on these arguments and therefore have isolated these cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/business/fast-food-workers-seeking-higher-wages-plan-another-
strike.html?_r=0

Fast-Food Workers Seeking $15 Wage Are Planning Civil

Disobedience
By STEVEN GREENHOUSESEPT. 1, 2014
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

Demonstrators outside a McDonald's restaurant in New York in May. Fast-food workers seeking higher wages plan
new strikes and demonstrations this week. CreditBrendan Mcdermid/Reuters

The next round of strikes by fast-food workers demanding higher wages is scheduled for Thursday, and this time
labor organizers plan to increase the pressure by staging widespread civil disobedience and having thousands of
home-care workers join the protests.

The organizers say fast-food workers who are seeking a $15 hourly wage will go on strike at restaurants in
more than 100 cities and engage in sit-ins in more than a dozen cities.

But by having home-care workers join, workers and union leaders hope to expand their campaign into a broader
movement.

On Thursday, we are prepared to take arrests to show our commitment to the growing fight for $15, said
Terrence Wise, a Burger King employee in Kansas City, Mo., and a member of the fast-food workers national
organizing committee. At a convention that was held outside Chicago in July, 1,300 fast-food workers unanimously
approved a resolution calling for civil disobedience as a way to step up pressure on the fast-food chains.

Theyre going to use nonviolent civil disobedience as a way to call attention to what theyre facing, said Mary Kay
Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has spent millions of dollars helping to
underwrite the campaign. Theyre invoking civil rights history to make the case that these jobs ought to be paid
$15 and the companies ought to recognize a union.

President Obama, in a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, mentioned the fast-food campaign, saying, All across the
country right now theres a national movement going on made up of fast-food workers organizing to lift wages so
they can provide for their families with pride and dignity.

Mr. Obama added that if he had a service-sector job, and wanted an honest days pay for an honest days work, Id
join a union.

Fast-food chains and many franchise operators have said that $15 an hour was unrealistic and would wipe out
profit margins at many restaurants. Some business groups have attacked the campaign as an attempt by a fading
union movement to rally a new group of workers.

Some franchise operators have dismissed the walkout, saying that in previous one-day strikes, only a handful of
employees at their restaurants walked out, barely disrupting business. But organizers say that workers walked out
at restaurants in 150 cities nationwide during the last one-day strike in May, closing several of them for part of the
day, with solidarity protests held in 30 countries.

The S.E.I.U., which represents hundreds of thousands of health care workers and janitors, is encouraging home-care
aides to march alongside the fast-food strikers. The union hopes that if thousands of the nations approximately
two million home-care aides join in it would put more pressure on cities and states to raise their minimum wage.

They want to join, Ms. Henry said. They think their jobs should be valued at $15.
S.E.I.U. officials are encouraging home-care aides to join protests in six cities Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland,
Detroit and Seattle. Union leaders say the hope is to expand to more cities in future strikes.

Jasmine Almodovar, who earns $9.50 an hour as a home-care aide in Cleveland, said the $350 she took home
weekly was barely enough to support herself and her 11-year-old daughter. I work very hard Im underpaid,
she said. We deserve a good life, too. We want to provide a nice future to our kids, but how can you provide a
good life, how can you plan for the future, when youre scraping by day to day?

Within the S.E.I.U., there has been some grumbling about why has the union spent millions of dollars to back the
fast-food workers when they are not in the industries that the union has traditionally represented.

But Ms. Henry defended the strategy, saying that underwriting the fast-food push has helped persuade many
people that $15 is a credible wage floor for many workers. She said it prompted Seattle to adopt a $15 minimum
wage and that San Francisco was considering a similar move. She also said the campaign helped persuade the Los
Angeles school district to sign a contract for 20,000 cafeteria workers, custodians and other service workers that
will raise their pay, now often $8 or $9 an hour, to $15 by 2016.

This movement has made the impossible seem more possible in peoples minds, Ms. Henry said. The home-care
workers joining will have a huge lift inside our union.

Correction: September 1, 2014

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect surname for a Burger King employee in Kansas City, Mo. He is
Terrence Wise, not Hays.

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2014, on Page B3 of the New York edition with the
headline: Fast-Food Workers Seeking $15 Wage Plan Civil Disobedience at Strikes. Order Reprints| Today's
Paper|Subscribe
Opting Haven out of the state-mandated tests is our familys
act of civil disobedience
By Valerie Strauss April 6, 2015
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/06/opting-haven-out-of-the-state-mandated-
tests-is-our-familys-act-of-civil-disobedience/?utm_term=.b714796e829e

New York has been at the center of a national opt-out movement in which thousands of parents have refused to
allow their children to take new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core standards or to similar standards in
states that had originally adopted the Core but dropped them and designed their own. New York officials had
signed on several years ago to a multi-state consortium known as PARCC, which developed new tests aligned to the
Common Core, which public schools in the state have been implementing. But New York decided not to administer
PARCC for various reasons and contracted with Pearson to design its own set of tests, which students have taken
for a few years and will take again this month. The state now wants to design yet another new test and is seeking
proposals from test companies.
Last year some 60,000 students declined to take the tests in New York, and this year many more are expected. In
this post, one mother explains in a letter to her daughters teacher why she is opting her child out of New York tests
being given this month. The author is Britt Hamre, a lecturer in the Elementary Inclusive Program and co-odirector
of the Inclusive Classrooms Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. She wrote the following letter to her
daughters teacher about why she will not her child to take the state of New Yorks Common Core tests this month.
Here it is, with her permission.

Heres the letter from Britt Hamre to her daughters teacher:

Dear Grace,

It is with the highest level of respect for you that Im writing to inform you that Haven will not participate in the
state mandated standardized tests this April. Using student test scores to rate and rank students and teachers is an
ethically unsound practice and is degrading to the profession of teaching.
This year I have been in awe of your incredible skills as Havens teacher, and I know that no standardized test can
come even close to capturing what she has learned in your classroom. Furthermore, your bravery and resolve in the
face of the top down pressures from the State of New York may weigh on you, but you do not let that determine
your curricular decisions. Instead you teach with your heart and soul, and your excitement has ignited Havens
passion for social studies, reading, writing, and mathematics. No standardized test can measure the spirited dinner
conversations Haven has initiated this year about immigration, thanks to your elaborately designed integrated
social studies curriculum. I listen carefully as Haven describes class field trips in New York City, her excitement
about historical fiction, and her deep analysis of primary sources and questions regarding privilege, prejudice and
access. I cannot count the number of times Haven has greeted me at the door with, Mom, did you know?! No
test could possibly be designed to measure the multitude of ways in which she extends the investigations you start
in class, or document the initiation she has taken to write her own books at home about the immigrants living in
her mind. Her learning is demonstrated in her written work, performance of role-plays, various conversations, not
to mention your regular curriculum newsletters, extensive and detailed narrative reports, and personal emails.
Watching Haven learn this year has deepened my own commitment to preparing teachers to design integrated
curriculum that examines enduring questions and takes up multiple perspectives. Havens learning is travelling far
beyond the walls of your single classroom. I do not need a test score to validate her learning this year.
Haven is what most people would describe as a good student. She completes her work, she follows the rules, and
she gets along well with her peers. Simply put, Haven is good at school. But this year, in your class, Haven cannot
just slide by with simple compliance. Instead, you encourage her to take risks, be responsible for her own learning,
and communicate clearly when she is struggling with a concept or skill. You see her. You really see her for who she
is as a person, a learner, friend, and then you personalize your approach to best facilitate her development. Grace, I
know that your personalized approach to teaching is not something special for just our daughter; throughout your
eighteen years of teaching, youve honed your ability to promote high expectations for all children and uniquely
support and challenge each child in your class. Your teaching practices are grounded in the understanding that
learning happens when authentic relationships are built, trust is cultivated, and meaningful experiences are shared.
When students feel that they belong and are seen for their unique contributions, they are more willing to engage
and be open to taking risks. The value you have added to Havens development as a person and our lives is
immeasurable. No test can measure that.
Mostly though, a test cant measure Havens notions of justice or civic engagement and it is that aspect of who she
is becoming that weighs heavily on my mind. It is scary to go against the grain, and stand up for ones ideals,
especially when the easier path is to be compliant, not rock the boat, not cause waves. However, I cannot stand by
and watch Haven grow up making decisions out of fear: fear of being different, fear of consequences. We are
raising Haven to be an upstander, not a bystander. We know that you too could bow under the pressure of
mandated curriculum designed by outside corporations and published on the New York State Department of
Education website. You could abandon your integrated curriculum and devote hours preparing children for the
tests, but you courageously refuse to take that path. For this act of upstanding, we thank you. You have not bowed
to pressure to raise achievement test scores but instead, are committed to creating, maintaining, and sustaining a
true learning environment. And then you carefully document and assess that learning. Unlike the politicians and
business leaders who are determining state and federal educational policy, you are not confused about the
difference between learning and achievement test scores.
It is well known that using student test scores to calculate a teachers value added (VAM) score is unreliable as a
measure of teacher effectiveness. A recent study[1] found little to no correlation between high-quality instructional
practices and VAM scores. This misalignment is painfully apparent to practitioners in the field; in their letter[2] to
the Board of Regents, principals Carol Burris and Sean Feeney explain several problems with the Value Add Model
and with New York States APPR model for evaluating teachers.
Instead, there are numerous educational studies demonstrating that students test performance scores highly
correlate with family income and mothers education level, rather than with learning growth from year to year. We
will not participate in a policy that is inequitable, exclusionary and destructive to children, teachers, and public
schools. It is also important to openly acknowledge the privileged status I have in a historically and systemically
racist society. As a white, middle class, woman with a doctorate in education from Teachers College, I have
benefited my whole life from a segregated educational system, as does my daughter. It is this same privilege that
allows me to feel confident in my right to opt her out, with confidence that she is less likely to be negatively
affected by this action.
Every family has mantras and values they want their children to understand, espouse, and live by. For us, these
values include equity, inclusion, critical thinking, and activism. Using test scores to rank teachers and schools is not
only unscientific as the evidence conclusively demonstrates that achievement tests are not reliable or valid
measures of teachers effectiveness but it has fostered an environment of divisiveness, extreme competition, and
exclusion[3]. As an educator, I can see that high-stakes testing has had many detrimental effects as schools struggle
to raise test scores, at the expense of providing children a rich and deep curriculum.
Havens middle name is Walker. We named her that so as to have a daily reminder of Alice Walker and the lifelong
work she has done for equality, social justice, and anti-racism. Recently at a rally at City Hall, a parent ended her
speech with a quote by Alice Walker and Havens eyes shone with pride when hearing the words of her namesake. I
want to close with that quote; Alice Walker stated, The most common way people give up power is by thinking
they dont have any. Opting Haven out of the state-mandated tests is our familys act of civil disobedience.
We may be one family, with one child required to take a state test, but change can start with one person, and we
will not give up our right and responsibility to be the voice of dissent.
Sincerely,

Britt Hamre
 With Mass Civil Disobedience, Young Activists March Against
'Broken System'
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/09/mass-civil-disobedience-young-activists-march-against-
broken-system

At least 1,000 youth shut down intersections in march to the White House
by
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Demonstrators march through Washington, D.C. on Monday, November 9, 2015. (Photo: Jason Kowalski/Twitter)

Roughly 1,000 young activists are marching through the streets of Washington, D.C. on Monday in what they hope
will be the largest-ever planned civil disobedience action to demand racial, immigration, and climate justice reform
for a "broken" political system.

Under the banner Our Generation, Our Choice, millenials from a range of grassroots advocacy organizations
including 350.org, Million Hoodies, Working Families, and the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Networkblocked
traffic and shut down intersections as they marched to the White House, risking arrest to "inspire urgency and
courage from our elected leaders."

"What do we do when our communities are under attack? Stand up, fight back!" #OurGenerationOurChoice Tweets
they chanted. "Injustice, we'll stop it. People over profit!"

One contingent marched behind a sign that read, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Another laid down a
blank mural banner in the middle of an intersection as demonstrators used colorful paint to write or draw out their
vision for a just world.

At other times, they called out, "No borders, no nations, stop the deportations!"

"The voices of those that have gone unheard for too long will be heard in this moment," said Dante Barry, executive
director of Million Hoodies. "A cross-section of youth activism have come together to say that change is something
that we demand, and the time to act upon it is now. From environmental to criminal justice, the country we live in
today does not reflect the beliefs of the population it comprises."

"We are here to take a stand, and to make our mark for a better future for the next generation," Barry said. "As we
strive to strengthen the democratic process, we aim to empower those that have not yet found their voice while
giving power back to people in communities across the nation to show that we are standing together, stronger than
ever today. We will continue to work tirelessly and in solidarity until our goals are achieved."

The activists are demanding that Congress takes immediate action to "keep fossil fuels in the ground, protect and
respect the dignity and lives of immigrants, and black, brown, and poor communities; reinvest in healthy jobs,
renewable energy, and an economy that works for all of us," as organizers Yong Jung Cho, Waleed Shahid,
Devontae Torriente, and Sara Blazevic wrote in a piece published last week.

But more than that, they're presenting themselves as the stewards of a just future.

"Politicians arent the only voices with power," the young activists state. "We have power, too. And we have more
power when we act together. Young people dont live single-issue lives. We live at the intersection of the most
pressing problems today. Our movements are connected and our purpose is huge."
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/civ-dis.htm

This essay originally appeared in Christopher B. Gray (ed.), Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia, Garland Pub. Co,
1999, II.110-113. Copyright 1999, Peter Suber.

Civil Disobedience
Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College

Civil disobedience is a form of protest in which protestors deliberately violate a law. Classically, they violate the law
they are protesting, such as segregation or draft laws, but sometimes they violate other laws which they find
unobjectionable, such as trespass or traffic laws. Most activists who perform civil disobedience are scrupulously
non-violent, and willingly accept legal penalties. The purpose of civil disobedience can be to publicize an unjust law
or a just cause; to appeal to the conscience of the public; to force negotiation with recalcitrant officials; to "clog the
machine" (in Thoreau's phrase) with political prisoners; to get into court where one can challenge the
constitutionality of a law; to exculpate oneself, or to put an end to one's personal complicity in the injustice which
flows from obedience to unjust law or some combination of these. While civil disobedience in a broad sense is as
old as the Hebrew midwives' defiance of Pharaoh, most of the moral and legal theory surrounding it, as well as
most of the instances in the street, have been inspired by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King. In this article we will focus on
the moral arguments for and against its use in a democracy.

Objection: Civil disobedience cannot be justified in a democracy. Unjust laws made by a democratic legislature can
be changed by a democratic legislature. The existence of lawful channels of change makes civil disobedience
unnecessary.

Reply: Thoreau, who performed civil disobedience in a democracy, argued that sometimes the constitution is the
problem, not the solution. Moreover, legal channels can take too long, he argued, for he was born to live, not to
lobby. His individualism gave him another answer: individuals are sovereign, especially in a democracy, and the
government only holds its power by delegation from free individuals. Any individual may, then, elect to stand apart
from the domain of law. Martin Luther King, Jr., who also performed civil disobedience in a democracy, asks us to
look more closely at the legal channels of change. If they are open in theory, but closed or unfairly obstructed in
practice, then the system is not democratic in the way needed to make civil disobedience unnecessary. Other
activists have pointed out that if judicial review is one of the features of American democracy which is supposed to
make civil disobedience unnecessary, then it ironically subverts this goal; for to obtain standing to bring an unjust
statute to court for review, often a plaintiff must be arrested for violating it. Finally, the Nuremberg principles
require disobedience to national laws or orders which violate international law, an overriding duty even in (perhaps
especially in) a democracy.

Objection: Even if civil disobedience is sometimes justified in a democracy, activists must first exhaust the legal
channels of change and turn to disobedience only as a last resort.

Reply: Legal channels can never be "exhausted". Activists can always write another letter to their congressional
delegation or to newspapers; they can always wait for another election and cast another vote. But justice delayed,
King proclaimed, is justice denied. After a point, he argued, patience in fighting an injustice perpetuates the
injustice, and this point had long since been passed in the 340 year struggle against segregation in America. In the
tradition which justifies civil disobedience by appeal to higher law, legal niceties count for relatively little. If God
trumps Caesar to justify disobedience to unjust law, then God can trump Caesar to permit this disobedience sooner
rather than later. In this tradition, A.J. Muste argued that to use legal channels to fight unjust laws is to participate
in an evil machine, and to disguise dissent as conformity; this in turn corrupts the activist and discourages others by
leading them to underestimate the numbers of their congeners.

Objection: We must obey the law under a contract with other members of our society. We have tacitly consented
to the laws by residing in the state and enjoying its benefits.
Reply: Obviously this objection can be evaded by anyone who denies the social contract theory. But surprisingly
many disobedient activists affirm that theory, making this an objection they must answer. Socrates makes this
objection to Crito who is encouraging him to disobey the law by escaping from prison before he is executed.
Thoreau and Gandhi both reply (as part of larger, more complex replies) that those who object deeply to the
injustices committed by the state can, and should, relinquish the benefits they receive from the state by living a life
of voluntary simplicity and poverty; this form of sacrifice is in effect to revoke one's tacit consent to obey the law.
Another of Thoreau's replies is that consent to join a society and obey its laws must always be express, and never
tacit. But even for Locke, whose social contract theory introduces the term "tacit consent," the theory permits
disobedience, even revolution, if the state breaches its side of the contract. A reply from the natural law tradition,
used by King, is that an unjust law is not even a law, but a perversion of law (Augustine, Aquinas). Hence, consent to
obey the laws does not extend to unjust laws. A reply made by many Blacks, women, and native Americans is that
the duty to obey is a matter of degree; if they are not fully enfranchised members of American society, then they
are not fully bound by its laws.

Objection: What if everybody did it? Civil disobedience fails Kant's universalizability test. Most critics prefer to
press this objection as a slippery slope argument; the objection then has descriptive and normative versions. In the
descriptive version, one predicts that the example of disobedients will be imitated, increasing lawlessness and
tending toward anarchy. In the normative version, one notes that if disobedience is justified for one group whose
moral beliefs condemn the law, then it is justified for any group similarly situated, which is a recipe for anarchy.

The first reply, offered in seriousness by Thoreau and Gandhi, is that anarchy is not so bad an outcome. In fact, both
depict anarchy as an ideal form of society. However, both are willing to put off the anarchical utopia for another
day and fight in the meantime for improved laws; consequently, this strand of their thinking is often overlooked.
Another reply is a variation on the first. Anarchy may be bad, but despotism is worse (Locke instead of Hobbes). If
we face an iniquitous law, then we may permissibly disobey, and risk anarchy, in order to resist the tendency
toward the greater evil of despotism. A.J. Muste extended this line of thinking to turn the slippery slope objection
against itself. If we let the state conscript young men against their wills to fight immoral wars, then what will the
state do next? For Muste, conscription puts us on a slippery slope toward despotism, and obedience would bring us
to the bottom.

Utilitarians observe that disobedience and obedience may both be harmful. The slippery slope objection falsely
assumes that the former sort of harm always outweighs the latter. In the case of an iniquitous law, the harm of
disobedience can be the lesser evil. This utilitarian reply is sometimes found to coexist with a complementary
deontological reply, for example in Thoreau: one simply must not lend one's weight to an unjust cause.

Ronald Dworkin replies, in effect, that the descriptive version of the argument is false and the normative version
irrelevant. There is no evidence that civil disobedience, even when tolerated by legal officials, leads to an increase
in lawlessness. Moreover, rights trump utility. Since (for Dworkin) there is a strong right to disobey certain kinds of
unjust laws, and since the slippery slope argument points only to the disutility of disobedience, this is a case of a
right in conflict with utility; hence the right to disobey must prevail.

The normative version of the slippery slope argument has little force if the criteria used by activists permit some
but not all disobedience. In Kant's language again, universalizability fails if the maxim of the action is "disobey a law
whenever you disapprove of it," but it can succeed if instead the maxim is, "disobey when obedience would cause
more harm than disobedience," or "disobey when a law is unjust in the following specific ways...." And it must be
said, virtually all activists who practice civil disobedience follow criteria which endorse some, but not all,
disobedience. King, for example, did not advocate indiscriminate disobedience; he advocated disobedience of
unjust laws and obedience to the just. He articulated what he regarded as public, objective criteria which help us
identify the unjust laws which may or must be disobeyed, and the just laws which must obeyed. Any attempt to
articulate the distinction between the two sorts of law is in effect an attempt to show that the slide down the slope
can be halted, or that the maxim to disobey can be universalized.
King had a second reply, inspired by Gandhi: he deliberately made his example difficult to imitate. He pressed for
negotiation before turning to disobedience; he underwent self-purification before every disobedient action; he
accepted blows from police without retaliation; he accepted arrest and punishment. These tactical features of his
actions had other purposes as well, but there is little doubt that they prevented onlookers from thinking that here
was a criminal getting away with murder whose example could be imitated with profit.

The counter reply, made by Waldman and Storing is that the example of the careful disobedient will be imitated by
the careless, and cannot be confined, especially if activists cloak their disobedient acts in the rhetoric of
righteousness. If true, this instantly makes replies to the normative version of the slippery slope objection
irrelevant. Caution in stating our criteria so that normatively we stop our slide far from the bottom does nothing to
prevent the example from being misinterpreted or oversimplified by the less cautious. Scrupulosity in self-
purification, courage in accepting blows, and sacrifice in accepting punishment do not stop the unscrupulous from
being inspired by the example of disobedience as such.

One direct response, then, to the descriptive version held by Waldman and Storing comes from Rawls, who argued
that civil disobedience can actually help to stabilize a community. It can be destabilizing if a very large number of
people do it, but this rarely happens, and when only a few do it, it can have the beneficial and stabilizing effect of
nudging a society closer to its shared vision of justice.

Thoreau and Wasserstrom argue that while many in fact might be morally justified in disobeying, few in fact will
actually disobey. For Thoreau and A.J. Muste, this inertia and docility in the general population are far larger
problems than incipient anarchy.

Sometimes activists can point to the lawlessness of their opponents as the real concern. Thoreau claimed that the
only harmful consequences of civil disobedience were triggered by the government's reaction to it. King painted
white segregationists as the group most likely to precipitate anarchy, since it disobeyed desegregation laws without
regard to their legitimacy or justice. Moreover, an activist need not be an anarchist to welcome widespread
imitation. Thoreau ardently wished that all opponents of slavery would act on their convictions. He would regard a
prediction of widespread imitation of his disobedience as an inducement to act, not as an objection. At this point,
critics must be careful not to use the slippery slope objection inconsistently, by predicting anarchy to those who
fear it, and inert indifference to those who fear that. On the other hand, activists who welcome imitation should
probably do all they can to encourage this imitation; Thoreau did nothing of this kind until he wrote his extremely
influential essay two years after he was arrested for withholding his poll tax.

Gandhi, Mohandas K. Satyagraha in South Africa. Trans. Valji Govindji Desai. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing
House, 1928.

Bedau, Hugo Adam (ed.). Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Harris, Paul (ed.). Civil Disobedience. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1989.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter From Birmingham Jail." In his Why We Can't Wait. New York: New American Library,
1964, pp. 76-95.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Variorum Civil Disobedience. Ed. Walter Harding. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1967

Peter Suber, Department of Philosophy, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374, U.S.A.
[email protected]. Copyright 1999, Peter Suber.
https://www.salon.com/2015/11/02/heres_why_were_committing_civil_disobedience_millennials_can_no_longer
_be_silent_about_our_broken_system/

Heres why were committing civil disobedience: Millennials can no

longer be silent about our broken system
On Nov. 9, were staging the largest-ever civil disobedience for racial, climate, and immigrant justice. Heres why
4
YONG JUNG CHO, WALEED SHAHID11.02.20156:02 AM
Its election season. One side promises incremental reforms without a plan for how they would get an agenda
passed through a gridlocked Congress. The other side uses thinly-veiled racist language about immigrants to talk
about plans to bring our country back to a fictionalized, lily-white version of our nation's history. Too often, both
parties put the demands of big money over the hopes of real people. Despite the campaign rhetoric and the noise
of the 24-hour news cycle, most Americans will tell you that they think our political system is broken. 83 percent of
young people say they have no faith in Congress.
Today we face a true crisis of democracy: the will of the people is no longer the priority of our political system. Our
government is failing us. Democrats keep letting us down. Republicans are terrifying. Politicians continue to blame
each other, failing to act on the most pressing issues of our time. It's no surprise why: from every side, we see
cynical pitches to Americans' worst instincts and modest solutions proposed to big problems. Common sense
measures on immigration, student debt, gun safety, incarceration, policing, and climate change have no chance of
passing our broken system. Any visionary piece of legislation is threatened by a small number of Tea Party members
refusing to pass any laws or gets stuck for years bouncing back and forth between closed-door committee
hearings. As democracy is thrown to the wayside, we have ended up with the clearest signs of plutocracy:
government by and for the wealthy determined to preserve the status quo and emboldened by procedural gridlock.

Meanwhile, politicians continue to throw away billions of dollars incarcerating people, deporting mothers and
fathers, and polluting our people and our planet. They continue to saddle us with student debt. They arent
helping create real jobs that can sustain us. They stand by as many of our friends live in daily fear
of police and immigration enforcement. And they continue subsidizing polluting fossil fuel companies who destroy
the land we live on and the air we breathe.
We are running out of patience. After years of political inaction and failure, young people are taking these crises
into their own hands. The Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, the immigrant
rights movement, Moral Mondays led by people of faith, and fast food workers on strike have captured the
attention of the American people, but not of Congress. Now our movements are starting to come together to begin
to speak with one voice.
On November 9, one year ahead of the presidential election, hundreds of young people will take part in the largest-
ever civil disobedience for racial, climate, and immigrant justice. The choice is clear: politicians are failing to take
our country to where it needs to go, so a movement of young people will lead us there. While politicians and the
media continue to talk about left versus right, the Millennial Movements are talking about a different direction:
forward.
We are not talking about some sort of beltway consensus between the parties and big business where the interests
of the American people are compromised. We are talking about something completely outside the current confines
of political debate.
It takes courage and dramatic action from ordinary people to do that. As politicians risk away our lives, we risk jail
time to inspire urgency and courage from our elected leaders. We are taking to the streets of Washington, D.C. to
demand that we keep fossil fuels in the ground; protect and respect the dignity and lives of immigrants, and black,
brown, and poor communities; reinvest in healthy jobs, renewable energy, and an economy that works for all of us.
Politicians arent the only voices with power. We have power, too. And we have more power when we act together.
Young people dont live single-issue lives. We live at the intersection of the most pressing problems today. Our
movements are connected and our purpose is huge. Martin Luther King described the civil rights movement as a
time when the people moved their leaders, not the leaders who moved the people. If enough of us push together
toward a new vision, the world will begin to move.
Young people arent just the future -- we are the present. We are at the forefront of the fight for a more just,
equitable, and stable world. Throughout history, a country founded to maintain the wealth and privilege of a few
has been transformed by powerful movements that have expanded the meaning and practice of the we in we
the people. Now, it is our turn.
The average age of a Senator is 62. Todays Congress is the most diverse it has ever been: 80% white, 80% male,
92% Christian. But a coalition of millennials, people of color, unmarried women, immigrants, queer and trans
people will make up a majority of voters for the first time in 2016. Young people are at the forefront of movements
for social change, and are becoming increasingly engaged in the political process. And we are already winning. After
years of action, our issues were at the forefront of the first Democratic debate. Candidates now have to speak on
their plans to take on climate change, racial injustice, mass deportations, and economic inequality.
But shifting the debate wont be enough. If politicians won't lead this country forward from an economy in crisis to
a society that works for all people, then we will. We take action to tell the American people: lets get it done
together. Our generation. Our choice.

Yong Jung Cho is the Campaign Coordinator for 350.org, a global climate action organization. She
tweets @yongjungc.
Waleed Shahid is the Political Director of PA Working Families Party and a movement-building trainer
with Momentum. He tweets at @waleed2go.

Devontae Torriente is the campus organizer of Million Hoodies, a national racial justice network, at American
University in Washington D.C.

Sara Blazevic is the campaign coordinator for the Fossil Fuel Student Divestment Network.