Individual moral responsibility justifies disobeying unjust laws

Evidence

Lobna’s defiance conjured up the words of a luminary who had been locked up nearly fifty-seven years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama. “I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail, affirming that an individual not only has a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but even more so, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Lobna echoed King’s very sentiment with millennial rebelliousness but the same steely conviction. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 819

Categorization

• XREF: Connects hijab resistance to civil disobedience lineage—King’s Birmingham jail reasoning applied to a Quebec student’s refusal, relevant to the reader’s broader rights-framing project. — connects to: Even the worst situations remain fundamentally human and thus our responsibility — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1288; Citizenship as uncritical law-obedience is ethically indefensible when states harm communities. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 268