Arianna Laolagi wrote this piece on legal defiance for the Art of Writing Spring 2025 Legal Studies course “Theories of Justice” taught by Christopher Kutz and Laura Ramirez. “Theories of Justice” is a lecture course with an optional writing-intensive section. This essay is a finalist in the Spring 2025 Art of Writing Student Essay Contest.
One cannot reflect on the history of American civil rights without acknowledging the United States’ sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, and Baptist minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for their resolute resistance to racial inequality. Since their tragic assassinations, both names have become synonymous with the idea of social justice. While Dr. King’s civic duties differ from those of an elected president— whose loyalty under oath lies with the preservation, protection, and defense of the Constitution — both leaders share a common obligation: to fervently fight against the intolerable injustices of their country.
In this paper, I will evaluate two different quotes from both our civil and political example of leaders that invite political defiance against unjust institutions, assess their philosophical groundings, and explore a potential counter-argument for their present day application. I argue that these claims supporting legal defiance, having been supported by a diverse group of established and respected philosophers — John Rawls, Charles Mills, and Tommie Shelby — are valid and applicable to both elected political leaders and civilians.
While Dr. King’s advocacy was broad, one of his most central messages was to inspire powerful, peaceful, and persuasive civil defiance when necessary. For President Lincoln, his advocacy was also for peaceful change and for the revision of unjust laws —laws that infringe on the rights of individuals. But, under what circumstances is political defiance or legal revision “necessary”?
According to Dr. King, disobedience is required of all citizens in the face of unjust laws. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, he writes “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” For Lincoln, he supported this same notion in his Lyceum Address, “Let every American, every lover of liberty…never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”
Dr. King’s second claim comes from the same letter, demonstrating the absolute necessity for the oppressed group to protest against the government’s complacency with intolerable injustice, “Individuals in the struggle must come to realize that it is necessary to aid time, that without this kind of aid, time itself will become an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of social stagnation.” His urgency is driven by the reality that patience’s status as a virtue is nullified in an exploitative social scheme, acting instead as a threat to the pursuit of justice.
President Lincoln, while not a traditional abolitionist in the sense that he supported slavery’s immediate emancipation, shared a similar sentiment and sense of urgency for civic resistance during a speech at Chicago in 1859, “But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end.”
In urging citizens to resist slavery in “every way”, ultimately championing its elimination, he demonstrates an alliance with the peaceful, yet firm defiance that Dr. King advocates for. Three arguments are being made in these quotes. First, we have a natural duty to obey just laws. Second, we have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. And last, peaceful and reasonable civil disobedience, and, in some cases, deviance, is warranted in an intolerably unjust schema.
Before assessing the philosophical groundings of each argument, we must first establish the common principles that bind both a civilian and a political leader to the same civic duty — to defy the laws of an unjust institution. According to Rawls’ principle of fairness — the foundation for all obligations — a person must perform their role in accordance with the rules of the institution they are part of only when (1) the institution is just and (2) when the person has voluntarily accepted benefits or taken advantage of opportunities offered by the arrangement.
The principle of fairness makes no distinction between those who govern and the governed. It implies that no one, not even those bound under oath to its maintenance and preservation, can be legitimately bound to an unjust institution (Rawls 97). Therefore, once an institution is proven to be unjust, everyone under its rule, even those in power, are not only morally permitted, but also obligated to resist.
Moving on to the first claim — our natural duty to obey just laws — we must first explore the circumstances of justice, the principles of justice, and what having a “natural” duty to uphold justice means. According to Rawls, the circumstances of justice are, “the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary” (Rawls 109). The principles that define these conditions of human cooperation are narrowed down into two.
First, in order for a society to be just, each person must have equal rights to “basic liberties” which Rawls lists as political liberties — the right to vote and hold public office, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly and the liberty of conscience — freedom of religion, freedom from psychological oppression, the right to hold personal property, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. The second principle of justice, also known as the difference principle, anticipates natural social and economic inequalities and demands these inequalities to be arranged in a way that is “reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage” (Rawls 53).
With this in mind, Rawls states that every citizen under a just constitution, has a natural duty to “support and to further” that just institution; meaning that we must comply with its laws and contribute to its functioning (Rawls 293). But, why are these ‘natural duties’? Rawls argues that answering this call to uphold just institutions that we naturally benefit from should be unconditional, rather than dependent on whether they serve our best interests (Rawls 99).
This understanding provides a stronger foundation for political stability to rest upon, as it upholds another natural principle — the principle of reciprocity. Citizens need the assurance that their peers are similarly committed to maintaining just arrangements. If political obligations depended on voluntary inclinations, people would doubt whether they are bound to or even protected by these laws. These doubts are the perfect recipe for political unrest, which introduces both Dr. King’s and former President Lincoln’s second claim; our moral obligation to disobey unjust laws.
Rawls admits that unjust laws are an unfortunate, unavoidable reality. Simply put, it is impossible for society to be perfectly just. What is possible, however, is implementing the most just circumstances achievable that agree with the judgments of those in the original position — individuals under the veil of ignorance — those without knowledge of their own position in reality — who must consider the most equitable circumstances given the chance they might be the worst off in society. In reality, certain circumstances require its citizens to tolerate unjust law in order to protect the standing of the most just society possible — a notion that he describes as the “partial compliance theory”.
But what is injustice? Injustice is marked by a departure from “publicly accepted standards” (Rawls 309). Publicly accepted standards are a central part of his concept of the Well-Ordered Society, ensuring that a society’s principles of justice can be justified using logic that is “true and in accordance with existing knowledge” (Rawls 403). When injustice becomes ‘intolerable’ is when its laws deviate so much so from these standards that they “exceed certain limits of injustice”— limits that Rawls leaves to the imagination of the reader, as they vary considerably case by case as society evolves and their notions of justice develop (Rawls 308). Once they do exceed these limits, Rawls states that we certainly are “not required to acquiesce in the denial of our own and others’ basic liberties,” because doing so would be inconsistent with our natural duty of justice. But, what do these undefined “limits of injustice” look like in practice? Were these limits crossed during Martin Luther King’s political advocacy or President Lincoln’s presidency?
Tommie Shelby, a well respected American philosopher and Harvard Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies, defines these limits in his work, “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto”. One line is whether the ‘constitutional essentials” or the basic liberties, as Rawls earlier established, are secure (Shelby 145). When deciding whether an oppressed group’s collective civil deviance is justified, we must ask whether they have access to due process and judicial fairness. Are they able to vote and run for office? Is their status as full citizens — their right to participate in democracy — immune to these injustices?
Prior and during President Lincoln’s presidency, the status of African Americans as humans, nonetheless as full citizens, was legally undermined constantly — one example being through the three fifths compromise where slaves would only count as ⅗ of a person for representation in Congress. In Charles Mills’ Racial Contract, he narrates the religious roots of this reality for African Americans. He reflects on the fact that if nonwhites were to be fully recognized as people — sons and daughters of God, it would be impossible to justify their exploitation of people of color (Mills 112).
Since basic human rights and social goods were stripped away from African Americans — people Mill mentions were considered to be at the time, “somewhere between man and cattle” (Ibid.), the era of American slavery surpassed the conditions for “intolerable injustice”. Throughout Martin Luther King’s career, America’s political and social climate also met the standards of what Rawls would call “intolerable injustice”. Shelby states that “those who are denied this (basic liberties) can legitimately object that they are not being treated as equally valid members of a scheme of cooperation that is supposed to be mutually advantageous” (Shelby 149). To uphold our natural duty to Justice is to be disobedient under repressive laws. “No societies or institutions could exist, at least not for very long, if individuals did not work to create and sustain them.” (Shelby 153)
Now that we have established that disobedience is warranted in intolerably unjust conditions, why are protests and acts of deviance also warranted? Shelby lists justified responses to intolerably unjust schema to be, “nonviolent civil disobedience, public demonstrations, or other forms of mass protest that attempt to arouse the public’s sense of moral outrage” (Shelby 157). While these responses might be limited to civil participation, the fact remains that when these recognized avenues of political action prove to be ineffective, alternative avenues of protest or legal revision are necessary.
As Lincoln made clear, resistance of “all” kinds are warranted in halting the perpetuation of an unjust regime such as slavery. If the oppressed group fails to take action that disrupts the order of an exploitative institution, that institution will remain intact. Shelby affirms this notion by saying that “When the publicly recognized standards for judging the justice of the basic structure are sound but the institutional arrangement of the society fails to satisfy these standards — this setup creates an ideology of justice that helps to sustain an oppressive regime” (Ibid).
If the oppressed should ignore the calling of both their natural duty of justice and self-respect, nothing will change. For those outside of the oppressed group, either benefiting or immune from the injustices of an institution, there is no incentive to change. The oppressed must take action that deviates from the institution’s corrupted sense of justice so much so that they consider it “radical.” If their response fits under the institution’s internal standard of justice, their “basic liberties” will continue to be denied.
Fifty years after King’s death and over a century after Lincoln’s, their arguments remain valid from a civilian’s perspective and from a political leader’s perspective. One might respond to this by appealing to the narrative of personal failure — that these “intolerable injustices” are not a product of a structural failure anymore with the Civil Rights Act having “reformed” the Constitution. They might argue that now, these inequalities are a symptom of impoverished Black people living in ghettos’ inclination towards crime and refusal to take advantage of resources. Thus, they violate the principle of reciprocity, reaping social benefits without contributing to the shared burden of maintaining society. However, this objection falls prey to the American obsession with the “bootstrap” fallacy and falsely assumes this “reformed” Constitution has successfully created circumstances of justice that are uniform for all and that benefit everyone.
Shelby demonstrates that the U.S. has employed legal loopholes to historically confine the ghetto poor to substandard education, low-paying jobs, and mass incarceration. “Given rising inequality and the worsening of the ghetto/prison complex, which show no signs of abating, they have every reason to believe that their interests are not being given equal consideration.” (Shelby 156) These conditions are not coincidental, but are defined clearly in the aforementioned historically hidden and exploitative document, the Racial Contract. Within these systems, these abhorrent inequalities are not a result of personal failure — they are a guarantee under the Racial Contract, of which white people are the beneficiaries. He emphasizes that the function of this arrangement is “the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities” to nonwhite groups and the “exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources.” (Mills 11)
Therefore, acts of legal defiance or even certain forms of deviance must be understood not as failures of character, but as responses to an intolerable and unjust social arrangement as defined by Rawls. Deviance from unjust norms or laws is not only reasonable, but often required to disrupt the racialized structure that denies many basic liberties As Mills explains, the coercive instruments of the state — police, prisons, and surveillance are effectively “enforcers of the Racial Contract,” maintaining a racial order and “destroying challenges to it.”
Both civilians and political leaders have a moral duty and civic obligation to fight fervently against the perpetuation of unjust social institutions. No oath can diminish our natural duties to preserve justice. Grounded in the principle of fairness, both an activist like Dr. King, and an elected U.S president, such as Abraham Lincoln, are released from their civic duties once an institution is found to be unjust. Their resistance and commitment to legal reform must therefore not be seen as a betrayal, but as the restoration of justice.
Works Cited
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail. Penguin Classics, 2018.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Lyceum Address.” January 27, 1838. Teaching American History.
Lincoln, Abraham. “Speech at Chicago, Illinois”. Debate, July 10, 1858. From Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-at-chicago-illinois/ (accessed May 10, 2025).
Mills, Charlies W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt5hh1wj. Accessed 12 Apr. 2025.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
Shelby, Tommie. “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 35, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 126–160, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2007.00106.x.