The Highest Respect for Law

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Civil disobedience carries a paradox at its centre, and Martin Luther King Jr. was the one who said it out loud. A person who breaks a law they consider unjust, does so openly, and then accepts the punishment the law prescribes is not showing contempt for law, King argued; they are showing it the very highest respect, because they are proving by their own willingness to be punished that they are not simply evading a rule that inconveniences them. That distinction, between the outlaw who hides and the resister who stands still and takes the sentence, is what separates civil disobedience from ordinary crime, and it is why the tactic has recurred across movements that otherwise had little in common. Susan B. Anthony used it in the American women's suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth century; Saad Zaghloul led a mass civil disobedience campaign against British rule during Egypt's 1919 revolution. Each case reached for the same wager: that a government forced to punish open, peaceful defiance in public view pays a political cost the original injustice never did.