>The hard case is when the legislature enacts morally
>controversial or even obviously (to some) wicked laws,
>like segregation or destroying habeas corpus or
>abolishing welfare (this last is also noncoercive).
It is economic coercion, which is still coercion. Forcing people to take jobs with slave labour wages and conditions is most definitely coercion.
>I don't dispute that there may be moral reasons for
>civil disobedience of such laws, and these reasons may
>trump, but surely there is some purely legal reason to
>follow them. They were enacted according to the only
>procedures we have for making those kinds of
>decisions, they carry the legitimacy of democratic
>decision-making, and the alternative to such
>decisionmaking is not pretty to contemplate.
>
>Now, we may think these laws are wrong and try to
>change when in the courts, in the legislature, and in
>the streets, but just because a law is wrong doesn't
>mean that there is no reason to follow it -- maybe
>just not an overriding reason.
If you think a law is wrong, you are entitled to break it. This, direct action, is one of the tried and true methods of reforming unjust laws. If possible you should do it openly and even ostentatiously, refusing to abide by an unjust law as a matter of high principle. In fact you sometimes have a civic duty to break unjust laws.
>And it depends on how wrong it is and how effective
>disobedience is likely to be in changing things.
Sure. But even if it isn't an effective method of changing the law, it is sometimes necessary to break it. As a matter of principle.
>Segregation was really wrong, but until there was a
>prospect for mass movement individual disobedience was
>just a way to get yourself hurt.
Sometimes, if there is a mass movement, then OBEYING the law can be an effective strategy for forcing change. I remember many years ago there was a local city council by-law which prohibited motor cycles from sharing parking meter spaces. Until one saturday morning when riders organised a mass protest which involved hundreds of bikers simultaneously occupying half the city parking meters. This disrupted business rather severely and the law was promptly changed.
> It's not even clear
>how one would commit civil disobedience against TANF,
>unless one ere in a very special position, a welfare
>bureaucrat or something.
What is TANF?
>Please note that my approach grounds law, or legal
>legitimacy, in the morality of democratic politics,
>which involves law, since democratic procedures have a
>legal form, but what makes those procedures have force
>is not the fact that they have a legal embodiment, but
>that they are the fairest procedures that are
>likeliest to produce the best outcomes. So I don't
>think, contrary to what Woj says, that law is free
>standing and based only in itself. Though many legal
>theorists disagree.
That isn't what he said, I recall he claimed something like that the law was based on the ability to enforce it. Which is misleading, law is based in the final analysis of the willingness of people to abide by the law. Laws effectively cannot be enforced by brute force alone, unless most people are willing to allow them to be enforced.
It follows that simple majority support for a law isn't enough to make it legitimate, if even a sizable minority of the people who the law seeks to govern refuse to accept it, then such a law is illegitimate. Doesn't matter if the law has a majority who will support it. It espewcially doesn't matter whether a law was put in place by a formal democratic system, except to the extent that people are more likely to accept a law so implemented as being therefor legitimate.
It is illegitimate because it is unenforceable and unenforceable law is obviously bad law. Which is consistent with what Wojtek is saying, but somewhat different in effect. It is important to understand that increasing the level of enforcement is not a solution to a law which is unpopular. Even if, for a time, people can be terrorised into sullen obedience, it won't hold in the long run. Rather it will likely lead to a corruption of the entire legal process. Undermining legitimacy in the whole body of the law and the agencies which make the law and enforce it.
It is relevant whether or not a law has majority support, but that isn't the be-all and end-all of the story.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas