Topics Law

Question In Question 325 (is there a difference between justice and law), Peter Lipton said that a law can be unjust. Reading it, I couldn't move past that question, because if a law is unjust, shouldn't it arguably lose its status as law? I mean it might be a law technically, written down on paper as law, but surely it can only have bad consequences if people follow it and understand it to be law - like the laws regarding Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany. Is this a valid point at all?

Accepted:
December 17, 2005

Comments

I'm inclined to think, yes, that if a law is unjust it should lose its status as a law, but it doesn't immediately follow that one has no obligation to follow that law. In the case of profoundly unjust laws, such as those regarding Jews in Nazi Germany, presumably it would, at least, be permissible not to follow the law. But there are many other laws that might be regarded as unjust that are far less oppressive. One might suppose one had an obligation to follow such laws out of a kind of respect for the law. What one ought to do instead might be to attempt to get the law changed. Of course, in some cases, publicly and openly refusing to follow the law might be a way of drawing attention to its injustice: That's civil disobedience, in its simplest form.