unjust laws argumentative essay

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Just and Unjust Laws: an Analysis by Martin Luther King Jr.

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Updated: 15 November, 2024

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Table of contents

Just vs. unjust laws: what did dr. king say, the real impact of unjust laws, civil disobedience: the tool for change, the takeaway.

• Cone, J.H., (1991). "Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare." Orbis Books.
• Klein, H., (1986). "For All People: A Prayer Book For The Church Universal." Wipf & Stock Publishers.
• Miller, K.D., (1998). "Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King Jr. " Routledge.
• Shelby, T., (2005). "We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity." Harvard University Press.

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Why Is It Just to Break an Unjust Law? Essay

1. introduction.

Why is it just to break an unjust law? Essay Why is it just to break an unjust law? It seems very paradoxical and confusing for some to see fit to break a law and be praised by some as just and righteous. Yet, often times, such an act is not only just, but necessary to achieve justice. When the racist laws imposed on those of the African-American race by the government were seemingly more beneficial, and criminals unjust, riots were the only way to obtain justice. These acts of participation in this mass disobedience were supported rather than criticized by those perceived to be righteous. Why? Is it just to break an unjust law? It is obviously just to break an unjust law; why else would any citizen participate? Clearly, an unjust law is not the best way to resolve the problem which it was implemented to fix. This is an inherent contradiction of the very definition. Unjust laws were created in order to alleviate an injustice, not to fix it. Any law which does not resolve the intent of the legal issue is an unjust law. The intention of American Jim Crow laws was to reconcile the races of the union; however, they were inherently unjust, and thus, the United States of America was required to reflect on their legal system and resolve the issue. Thus, only after breaking the legal system and causing the law banning the liberties of the African American people to be abolished was the state able to come back and resolve the issue and thereby address the unjust legal issues which could not be resolved legally.

1.1. Definition of Just and Unjust Laws

Why is it just to break an unjust law? Essay. This essay provides a thoughtful, detailed though argumentative, and relevant answer to the title question. This response includes a critical analysis of the human dignity concept and concludes with a short reflection of the term “non-leadership”. The main argument to be developed in this section is that laws are instruments of social coexistence that have to serve both communitarian and individual rights. Otherwise, there is no other argument to argue that the compliance with the law has a moral duty or that it is in the essential interest of the different subjects that will be in the need of a legally responsible and capable partner. However, is it the need of a legally responsible and capable partner to comply with, to break or to resist an unjust norm at the service of communitarian and individual personal good? Law is a complex social polymorphous concept, and it can still vary within a given society over time. In this dimension, one has to recall that it is not just the official law, enacted by the State bodies validly established and involved by their collegial competence. It is crucial to show that there are laws that contradict, not only the so-called natural law claims but also those so-called “background dogmas” because, among other reasons, we are formed by educational and axiological perspectives that have been shaping our conviction’s horizon. Before starting to try and problematize the current shortcomings and merits of just and unjust laws, it is necessary to make a terminological determination of just and unjust laws. Then, to articulate the inter-epistemic dialogue between legality and justice in a real model of law, and in the third section, I will focus on the main question of this study.

1.2. Historical Examples of Breaking Unjust Laws

Once again, history has repeatedly witnessed the breaking of unjust laws. We cannot imagine World War II without the actions of people like Thomas Moore, known in history as the Man of Silence. He received this title only because he did not obey the law which contained an unjust requirement. This law was unfair because it stripped the good men of England from the priesthood against their will and according to their conscience. In a more recent historical period, we can remember Rosa Parks. Mrs. Parks was traveling on a bus and when the bus filled up and there were no more seats available, she was forced to give up her seat to a white man and stand up. The law that demanded it was unfair and denies people their right to healthy judgment. We can also remember another example. This is the period of voting rights. There were states in America that had laws that did not allow certain groups of people to register to vote. This was a huge injustice at a time when most of the residents were black. Voting formed and is still the foundation of our country's democracy. Chaos broke out in the streets because the residents received the right to vote and the public election of representatives. The unfair laws that did not allow them to vote were created to suppress the black vote. What was experienced at the time was terrible because it sparked violence and severe repression by government officials. During a period of political crises, Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing and declared all-out hunger. The Chinese government had decided to suppress societal students. The students passionately fought for their citizens' democratic rights and desired to bring about significant political change. In defiance of the law, they shouted slogans of freedom and democracy, thereby requiring that the Chinese government remove its dictatorship.

1.3. Thesis Statement

Why is it just to break an unjust law? Essay. It is not only necessary for people to break an unjust law; it is possible for people to break an unjust law although rare. Virtually every being base their decision on their belief that it is possible to resist oppression by breaking an unjust law. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the acquisition of civil rights was a cause worthy of broken laws when he outlined his philosophy in defense of civil disobedience in "Letter from Birmingham Jail". The subsequent paragraphs will expand and support MLK's three stages of philosophical defense for civil disobedience; breaking laws, openly, with clear conscience. Martin Luther King Jr. admonishes "certain so-called peace officers" are guilty of "doing a great injustice". It is not possible for the oppressed poor and oppressed minorities to peacefully protest against laws designed to keep them down. If the Negroes "marched without violence, they would be allotted a mere matter of minutes, before their temple would have to be disbanded. It is not a true difference of the value of civil disobedience and mob action or legal protests driven by negative emotion." It is an unfair comparison that "equates an unfit means" to a "legitimate" end. For those who are willing to learn from their ancestors, history is a powerful teacher. The fight for at least respect for human rights throughout history has been long and difficult, with the road to progress fraught with both suffering and sacrifice. From the time of the 1846 occupation of the Seneca lands of the United States, the Seneca of the Salvation Army had not abandoned their resistance to the further encroachment of the land and had petitioned the government for protection from the white legislators.

2. Justification for Breaking Unjust Laws

I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ Who is Christ ‘to the anities to stand up for justice and truth?’ About the disobedience or law-breaking we cannot live for a day. It is essential that the reasons be well laid out whereby if ever we exceed the limits of civil law, being aware of adverse consequences, in defense of our conscientious rights in the cause of justice and moral order, our actions will appear justifiable. A municipal law opposed to natural law is a contradiction in terms; and no recognition or respect for human rights as common is maintained therein. Man is the subject of all laws, and he is not intended in their service. All people have certain rights that cannot be abrogated by legislation. This means that the function of both civil government and civil laws is to protect these inherent rights of the people. The central issue for determining or recognizing an unjust law is whether or not that anomic law violates the inherent rights of people. Civil government must formulate laws and execute policies that reflect the consensus of the people as to what rights are inherent. This leads to and engenders societal protectivity since members will recognize laws that flow from inherent rights as necessary for the functioning of their communities and participation in its securing, as members will recognize laws that flow from inherent rights as necessary for participation in the securing of their communities. Laws and policies based on these rights are just. But indeed, civil power may not directly formulate laws in the area of the confessional moral conscience of its citizens, nor to interpret principles concerning the moral life of individual and family, nor in the area of educations of spiritual and moral subjects. Civil power cannot adopt or authorize instruments of a judgment of doctrinal action which would imply a derogation of moral law. If civil authority claims to have authority in these matters, it exceeds its jurisdiction for the religious realm has its own autonomy. We, therefore, should discriminate between the two.

2.1. Civil Disobedience as a Moral Duty

Why should we be clear about this distinction between just and unjust laws? The answer is found in the very fact that we keep quoting Martin Luther King's explanation of his decision to become part of the civil rights movement. He thought that he had an obligation to obey just laws and disobey unjust ones. This is what makes him depart from the ideas of the main thinkers who have justified civil disobedience, from Thoreau to Gandhi, and to the writings of German philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, or those of Paul and Pierre Arnold – to remain with the philosophy thinkers who have made the most relevant proposals in analytical terms – that is, that can be formulated in a way accessible to all. The main question of the second section of this essay is whether we should also disqualify King's thesis that implies that breaking an unjust law is both a moral obligation and an expression of loyalty to the community. Thoreau was the first of these thinkers to express clearly and justify the idea of civil disobedience against a representative and democratic government. He did not call it civil disobedience, but simply resistance to government. It is one's conscience, Thoreau wrote, that should determine the laws to obey and those to disobey. According to this essay by the 19th-century American thinker, an unjust law is a law that carries lack of respect for another person or that promotes evil – one should only obey laws that care for the wellbeing of the community. If nothing seems to warrant obeying the law in question, then reserving the right to break it is a duty. The reasons for this are, in essence, of a personal nature, and are related to the individuals regarding their life as a search for self-improvement, free from a routine existence under the rule of reality.

2.2. Legal and Ethical Arguments

Many of the arguments put forward in the contemporary discussion in favour of breaking an unjust law are rooted in the theoretical work of some important thinkers such as, to name a few, Hume, Dewey, Aquinas and Steiner. Their writings can be broadly summarised in terms of what today are described as legal and ethical arguments, both of which are vividly demonstrated in King's Letter. This section will consider both kinds of arguments and the next section will discuss some of the ideas that influence the current debate on the topic of breaking an unjust law. According to the legal argument, when a legal system systematically produces results inconsistent with our deepest shared moral understandings and legal obligations, individuals are encouraged if not forced to break the law. Something is wrong with the legal system and ‘the failure of the legal system to maintain and replenish its moral and communal resources endangers architects of order who can no longer have any cause to believe that laws will maintain the required degree of generality of application’. The legal argument is central to the King's Letter to Birmingham Jail. It was only when the injustices against Negroes became sufficiently unjustifiable that the subsequent decision by Southern Negroes to break the laws could have been justified at all. In his Letter, King admitted that, prior to the non-violent movement, though flavored with the sense for justice, was little more than an impatient impatience will result in disgust and creating the mirage of maximal action, nothing less than this has absolutely no chance of leading to how Negroes had been involved in numerous riots. But when slight action was forthcoming, the oppressive forces had a lot of things in scary-peaceful directives. They knew that the Negroes were only asking for justice to be done.

2.3. Consequences of Non-Compliance

The proponents of non-compliance with unjust laws believe that the latter action would help draw public attention to the problem, force the government and legal authorities to hold negotiations, and in the worst case, to use other, less harsh means of response. These can be conciliatory measures and legislative amendments. Thus, the violation of current penal norms in connection with the refusal of alternative civilian service may lead to desired shifts in legal norms; it may affect public and political processes and ultimately lead to positive changes in society. Nevertheless, disobedience to anti-democratic laws bears a risk to suppress the morale and political aspirations of the citizens that will significantly complicate the search for an effective compromise between the parties. This will undoubtedly contribute to the deterrence or even the disappearance of political processes in Moscow and in Russia. Indeed, the deliberate ignoring, by the state authorities, of means of communication with society such as media and the Internet, instead of calls for a conversation and an agreement, or, at least, the introduction of uniform norms, including those related to the activities of dispersed people, will lead to the fact that the control by the public will significantly diminish. However, as history shows, persistent requests for adequate attention of the power to the observance of civil rights and freedoms, the violation of which citizen is ready to oppose, in the best of cases can assume the development of fruitful dialogue between conflicting parties. Such a dialogue should end in mutual understanding but never in cruel "admonitions" which have caused a series of arrests on July 27 and August 3 in Moscow.

2.4. Criticisms of Breaking Unjust Laws

Unjust laws, Antigone and Socrates demonstrate how the treatment of the unjust can be considered just. If a just cause is considered, what they are forced to suffer cannot be seen as unfair. But not everyone has taken this reasoning. So far in this essay I have purposely neglected criticisms. It is easy to assume Plato Socrates would call all laws that violate his principles unjust. The choices might not be so clear in practice. One might argue that because citizens cannot recognize an unjust state for what it is and the good life is different for everyone, any law could be considered just from some perspective. Who would be fit to judge something as abstract as the best life for all, not just for themselves? In this essay and Plato Socrates' view only a philosopher king, with proper education, could recognize the good for himself and others, and thus choose just laws. I admit, perfectly just laws are pretty far-fetched. But unless citizens possess virtue, subscriptions to such laws, whether they are just or unjust, are futile anyway. In fact, even Socrates seems dubious about everyone's ability to comply with his principles. And what happens when an individual, unjustly forced, endures another's injustice and then becomes unjust themselves after the fact, is not reasonable. This, then, would also justify how the unjust could be punished. They had been given the chance to persevere the injustice done to them and become the unjust themselves, they and their suffering have their own punishment. It is not true that the unjust suffer for justice. Ergo, breaking unjust laws is just.

3. Conclusion

The six cases studied have made this general conclusion clear: breaking an unjust law, as long as its injustice is not the same act of breaking it, as long as all the criteria for the rightness of this act are met, is just. Moreover, this conclusion should not only have struck us, it should also have satisfied us. It must now be repeated that this general conclusion has not always been reached through a full and aboveboard analysis of the facts presented. Rather, a hurried or superficial analysis should, I believe, be faulted if there is fault here. First, anger toward wrongdoers wishing to cow their righteous opposition by such talk as, “We are the obeying sort; you had better be that sort too,” quiets itself. Even the most conformist should have what low comedians have called a “get-off-the-track” side to their thinking. If not, how can they ever expect persuasion to work on others? There is some chance of telling by others that the conformist temperament is opposed to oppression. If so, the latter can take a second look at who has the upper hand. If there is outvociferation in retelling the facts, if there is none, then they are not clear. All that is left to the rebel is to avoid the overdefensive reaction of the like to an attack of the like. If you act as you do because of avoidance of violence, why bother about violent threats? These are not called threats for nothing. However truculent, they will not touch you. Colonial America has some rather extensive dockets in support of this.

3.1. Recap of Arguments

Due to space constraints, we were able to recap only some of the chapters. Now, here they all are. In the first chapter, we saw that any law at all, no matter how outrageous, provided it is a law of the land, is said to be “just” and must be obeyed. We also saw that the ancient and contemporary belief that we must obey the laws regardless, without asking whether they are just is absurd and ethically unsound. We should instead ask this fundamental question: is this law razionabile (reasonable) or non razionabile? More generally, we should question whether the policies and actions of the State fall within the area of the reasonable or the unreasonable, on the basis of some objective moral or ethical standard. The transformation from simple law into just law or unjust law is not self-operated and necessarily follows a moral-juridical judgment by individuals or societal agents. These agents will naturally wonder why some rules (or legal decisions) are reasonable, just, and fair, while others indicatively are not, and of course what are the moral or ethical standards on which to base this distinction. The above belief is still held by many people, both in society and in institutions, which is indeed surprising. The rules of political and juridical morality are ignored to claim that it is right/morally binding to conform to the rules, whatever they are, without further investigation. The upholders of this claim will thus suggest that resistance is wrong, then any condemnation is also acceptable because the resistor sinned in the name of an alleged moral (law and justice). However, to obtain the override of the standard of conduct (obey the rules) compared to behavior according to the rules, it would be necessary to demonstrate that the duty of obedience prevails in dignity and in value to the substance of the rules themselves (matters of justice and legitimacy). As we have seen, however, the supporters of political and juridical positivism have not succeeded in providing this kind of demonstration. The conclusion of the things seen, concerning the matters of justice with regard to the unjust law, is the following: the disobedience to the non-razionale rule is a prima facie unjust behavior because prima facie prosecutable and condemnable, but every duty of obedience stops where the injustice begins.

3.2. Call to Action

I believe Gef is an example of a true hero. Though his circumstances were not extraordinary, a teenaged student whose most significant responsibility was to study, Gef chose to risk his own future by boycotting an unjust system. Likewise, it is now time for us to make a similar choice. During the time in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was actively protesting, he asked an important question: “Was not Jesus an extremist for love…” Similarly, I must ask, can any people in history ignore the declaration, "[We] believe that every man must carry the responsibility for the rights of men to show every way by which it is possible to purify from dishonor the concept of the worst conception of man?" As college students, our primary duty is to learn, so we may become valuable members of society. But how useful will we be to society, if we learn all we can, and willingly live with the knowledge that the basic rights of some of our fellow human beings are being violated? It is not a difficult choice for us to stand with the musicians or the workers who refuse to support discrimination and segregation. For those who have little power or status, standing on principles is generally done without hesitation. But I understand that in the real world, it is often an unpopular choice to speak against social customs, traditions, and especially laws. But even so, we are called to act. "Man is a product of his thought," said Gandhi. A man thinking of color-blind justice, and considering himself polyneal with all others who seek such justice, what kind of actions ought he take on the day when America decides to celebrate injustice? At the minimum, we must educate ourselves so we can better understand the problems we face. As students, all of us carry some responsibilities: to seek knowledge and to impart knowledge to others. This includes discussing not only the law, but also the justice and morality of oppressive policies. While not all of us can be King or Gandhi, we all can be heroes. We must understand that even if disobedience is our best or only action, that choice is legitimate. In choosing not to cooperate with injustice, one may see that he or she is actually engaging in justice activism. Much is expected of us because we have so much available to us. The training of a mind is everlasting. Acting against injustice even once, is of eternal consequence. Even our smallest actions have an effect, and even our smallest neglect is the acceptance of blandness. It is always difficult for someone to stand alone, but possible. It is harder to stand if we assume that we are alone, and both dangerous and unjust to let our fear keep others from joining us.

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An Unjust Law Is Not A Law At All Essay - Legal Foundations (LAWS110)

An unjust law is not a law at all

2-3 paragraphs (150-250 words)

Natural law

Law as authority Moral view point

Compliance with the law is demanded

As long as society accepts this, it is a law-

The concept of law is important to understand

Intro- my argument- support

Form vs function

Positivism vs natural law theory

Significantly a set of rules in order to be seen and classed as a law need to have a particular degree of moral standard. This is because unlike the positivism perspective, law is not solely a system of rules that performs a particular function.

Believe the natural law theory that law is a set of legitimate rules that must be morally legitimate. This is because the essence of law follows the idea that morality is interlinked with law and it is of significant importance

This is because law should be seen as morally justified for society to follow it. Significantly, without this moral legitimacy to law then it is just seen as a “meaningless concept and as the rules of the powerful”.

This is because the purpose and the function of law must be taken into account not just the form. This is because law is in place to regulate society’s behaviour. Since law must be “just” then an unjust law is not a law.

As a long as a large portion of society of society view it as unjust then it is not a law.

Law as a moral judgement.

Hart- structure of rules, The Concept of Law 1961 which focuses on law as a system of rules with a formal structure. This would argue that a law is a law. However, this does not take into account the moral legitimacy which is at the essence of law which make a law legitimate. This is because the key to law lies in the purpose and not the form or practice.

Purpose of law- Karl Llewellyn

As Weber establishes that the modern law system is not just based on Harts perspective of law that it is rule-governed but rather the rules are the basis of the legitimacy of the law. (page 14) Thus if there are unjust laws then the law is not just.

Law as authority- if it is unjust then it is not respected by people.

Moral authority. Law is not simply rules, when is a narrow and insular viewpoint, but instead by dvelving deeper into the concept of law to answer this idea, in fact the power of law is backed by morally legitimate power rather than law as a naked power. So when a law is not morally justified it loses it power and authority over a society so it ceases to follow the...

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