“Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law’s need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest…. Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest.” Archibald Cox, Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts, 40 N.Y. State B.J. 161, 169 (1968).
civil disobedience
civil disobedience. A deliberate but nonviolent act of lawbreaking to call attention to a particular law or set of laws believed by the actor to be of questionable legitimacy or morality.
