When Laws and Justice Clash

An unexpected benefit of the fact that few of us are proficient in ancient languages is that we have no idea what our college mottos mean.  If you investigate them, you will discover that they typically range from the banal to the pretentious.  “Veritas,” anyone?

But the motto of my graduate school alma mater — the University of Pennsylvania — has always struck me as an outlier: “Leges Sine Moribus Vanae,” which is derived from a quote by Horace, translates from Latin as “Laws without morals are useless.”

That phrase hit home as my wife and I finished watching a remarkable miniseries, ”A Small Light.” It tells the story of Miep Gies, who along with her husband Jan and three of her colleagues, hid and sustained Anne Frank, her family, and four other Dutch Jews for more than two years, under penalty of death. Talk about righteous Gentiles!  Why, she was asked, did she risk her life to save Jews?  “I am not a hero. I am not a special person. I don’t want attention. I did what any decent person would have done.”  Yet, there were millions of supposed “decent” people who turned a blind eye to extraordinary injustice, mindlessly accepting orders or obeying laws that undermined any sense of humanity.

The Shoah was an extreme case where civil disobedience to a rogue state was obviously justified. But what standard should be applied in other instances?  From protests concerning climate change or systemic racism in this country, to demonstrations regarding judicial “reform” in Israel, where do you draw the line between anarchy and exercising your moral obligation to stand up in the face of injustice?

A memorable tale involves Henry David Thoreau, who in 1846 refused to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery. When his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, visited him in jail, Emerson reportedly asked “What are you doing in jail?” to which Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out of jail?” As Thoreau argued in his classic essay “Civil Disobedience,” it is our duty to withhold support for unjust policies.  His willingness to be jailed wasn’t all that he and his family did to work against slavery: They sheltered fugitive slaves and aided their escape.  

My favorite treatise on the subject comes from Martin Luther King, Jr. After being arrested during a peaceful protest against the reprehensible laws of segregation, he composed his monumental “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Written 60 years ago, his words resonate today: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?  The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’” 

That raises a fundamental question in King’s mind: “How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

Jews look not just at our sacred texts, but at a code of conduct that has evolved over several millennia. Judaism provides a sense of right and wrong at its very core. When we live in a time and place when the secular powers violate that morality, we know what we must do.

If you have ever questioned the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr., I return to his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He pointed out that what the Germans did during the Shoah was technically “legal.”  But, he wrote, “I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal.” There is little doubt that he would have.

I am an economist, not a philosopher. But as an American and as a Jew, I believe that wrestling with the distinction between law and justice, and having the courage to defy the authorities when need be, is essential to living a life of righteousness.

Morton Schapiro is the former president of Williams College and Northwestern University. His most recent book (with Gary Saul Morson)
is “Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us.”