May There Be a Legal Obligation to Engage in Principled Disobedience?

The view is widely shared among many academics, legal practitioners, and laypeople that there is something inherently objectionable with, and necessarily indefensible in, legal disobedience. This view, deeply rooted in our legal communities as it may be, should strike us as at least presumptively overinclusive and thus puzzling in consideration of the fact not all kinds of lawbreaking can be claimed to be conceptually alike. A neat distinction seems to be in order between the conduct of those who violate the law out of expediency and personal gain, on the one hand, and those who do so out of a genuine concern for broad, or even society-wide, interests, on the other. Indeed, the self-interested disobedience associated with standard illegality is significantly different in its motivation, scope, aims, and underlying attitude from the disobedience grounded in principle. Accordingly, it seems to be entirely appropriate to at least consider not extending the general presumption against practices of legal disobedience to cases in which the standards of law are flouted on conscientious and other-regarding grounds. [Introduction]