ABSTRACT
Rawls and Dworkin both discuss civil disobedience within the context of a just, or reasonably just, state. As David Lyons points out, this limitation so commonly found in theoretical discussions of civil disobedience is problematic. It is both descriptively inadequate as a backdrop to many of the most significant historical campaigns of civil disobedience and morally untenable. If we look, for example, to the disobedience of Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., it is false to suggest that the legal systems they were opposing were reasonably or nearly just. Our understanding of their acts of disobedience is distorted if seen through the lens of traditional civil disobedience theory.
