Civil disobedience as law enforcement

Civil disobedience as law enforcement - Waging Nonviolence:

• Based on the Justinian Code’s protection of res communes, governments have long served as trustees for rights held in common.
• Legal rationales have played a critical role in many nonviolent movements. They strengthen participants by lending a sense of clarity that they are not promoting personal opinions by criminal means but rather performing a public duty. And they strengthen a movement’s appeal to the broader society by presenting action not as wanton lawbreaking but as an effort to rectify governments and institutions that are themselves in violation of the law.
• Future climate protesters can proudly proclaim that they are actually climate protectors, upholding the law, not violating it. Nobody should expect American judges to start acquitting protesters on public trust grounds any time soon. But juries that try climate protesters should keep in mind that they have the right and the responsibility to acquit those they believe have violated no just law.

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New York: The Police and the Protesters by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books

New York: The Police and the Protesters by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books:

“The police can see the defeat in our eyes. They know they’ve beaten us,” an Occupy Wall Street organizer told me a few days after the 2012 May Day demonstration that marked the movement’s fizzled attempt to stage a spring resurgence. “They used to look at us as adversaries. There was a certain respect. Now we’re objects of contempt, an excuse for them to get paid overtime. A safe, live-action game.”

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