How Civil Disobedience Has Affected Our Legal System in the U.S.

Criminality Issues

• Like most governments, the United States has not recognized civil disobedience as a legal means of protest. As such, when individuals using this form of protest are arrested, they face criminal trials. In the United States, courts tend to distinguish between criminal motive and criminal intent to resolve these cases. What this means is that while a protester might have done an admirable or even heroic thing, her intentions could still be considered criminal and thus worthy of punishment.
  
  

Political Necessity

• One defense that individuals often pursue in the courtroom when being tried for an act of civil disobedience is known as political necessity. This defense is entered as part of a not-guilty plea. While the individual being tried is often aware that he is on shaky legal grounds, if his conviction about the rightness of his actions is strong, he may use the political necessity defense as a method of educating the jury and the wider public about the political implications of what he has done.
  
  

Indirect Civil Disobedience

• As a result of the 1991 court case United States v. Schoon, the U.S. legal system now defines two distinct forms of civil disobedience: indirect and direct. Indirect civil disobedience involves breaking a law that is not actually the source of the protest. As legal scholar Graham Hughes has noted, this was frequently used as a tactic throughout the Vietnam War, as protesters argued in court that they were attempting to draw attention to their conviction that the war itself was illegal. The courts, however, generally refused to accept this claim, as the Vietnam War was regarded as a political, rather than legal, issue.
  
  

Direct Civil Disobedience

• Direct civil disobedience is a protest of a particular law that consciously breaks that law. Such acts were used throughout the Civil Rights Movement, and eventually brought public attention to issues of segregation that led to a legal reform of the treatment of African Americans in the United States. One of the most well known examples of direct civil disobedience was set by Rosa Parks in 1955, an African American woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, breaking the ordinance of that state that enforced segregation. Her act and subsequent arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the eventual repeal of segregation laws in that state.