Should we obey the law?

Are we duty bound to obey the law because it's the law, and seek to change rather than evade those laws we oppose? Or should we defy oppressive and intrusive laws as a matter both of preserving our own personal liberty and of limiting the reach of the state?

I'm not speaking just of what people actually do here, but of what they should do. Practically speaking, there are limits to people's willingness to obey the law, as I've written in the past. Whatever they should do, people don't obey laws they strongly oppose.

But what we do and what we ought to do are often two different things. So to what attitude toward the law should we aspire?

Your teachers probably told you that you have to obey the law. Most police officers work on that assumption too. So does just about anybody who dons a black robe and expects to be addressed as "your honor." Much ink has even been spilled in law journals to demonstrate that "we have a general moral obligation to obey the law," although, as lawyers often do, these efforts must deny that there is any significant difference between morality and the law.

But I've always found more credible the opposite view, perhaps best expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

An immoral law makes it a man's duty to break it, at every hazard. For virtue is the very self of every man. It is therefore a principle of law that an immoral contract is void, and that an immoral statute is void. For, as laws do not make right, and are simply declaratory of a right which already existed, it is not to be presumed that they can so stultify themselves as to command injustice.

Emerson's case seems to me especially persuasive since he was writing in 1851 not in the abstract, but about an actual law: the Fugitive Slave Law, which imposed heavy penalties on anybody who assisted slaves in escaping from bondage. People who considered slavery monstrous necessarily viewed the law as immoral. Many openly defied the measure. Emerson argued, convincingly I believe, that their defiance was commendable.

Do we have laws on the books today so immoral and damaging as to justify equivalent defiance? I think so. The drug-prohibition laws, which strip people of their freedom and property simply because they choose to use, manufacture or sell disfavored intoxicants, strike me as a prime example. So do laws like the one in Arizona which compel employers to check the backgrounds of their workers and to deny them the means to make a living if the government says they crossed an imaginary line on a map without official permission. I feel the same way about laws threatening fines and loss of freedom for people who engage in consensual activities like gambling and prostitution, or who simply own a firearm without jumping through the hoops required by local law.

And I would be particularly outraged by the reinstatement of any sort of conscription, which is nothing better than a prettied-up version of slavery.

I don't think there's an obligation to obey the law just because it's the law. I do think that morality is separate from the law and has a higher claim on us than whatever rules the latest crop of legislators have seen fit to impose.

And I think that each of us has both a right and a duty to undermine laws that intrude on our rights and oppress our freedom.