Distinction Between Just Law And Unjust Law

What is the distinction between a just law and an unjust law? To me the answer is evident, and I have a hard time believing that anyone couldn’t easily know the distinction or disagree with the distinction that Martin Luther King Jr. makes during his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” That “a just law is a man-made code that’s 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” (533). At its very basic definition, just laws protect the people and unjust laws hurt the people. Unjust laws and unjust execution of just laws is sadly a part our societies past and present. The men and women who create our laws are not always perfect. Some laws have evil intentions when being created, and some
have good intentions, but are used by evil people. It is these laws that we must stand up against and protect each other from.
I will never understand how a large group of people can completely lack any compassion or understanding for another group of people.
I can understand, maybe, not agreeing with or liking a group of people, but just to leave it at that. You don’t like them, so just stay away from them and leave well enough alone. It is a principle I teach my own children about other individual children or people they may meet and dislike in their life and a principle I wish the rest of the world would have. Sadly, the truth is, it doesn’t, and some of the people in these large groups have the power to create laws, with support, that directly affect the other group of people negatively. Just as we have seen with slavery, segregation, the women’s right to vote, and marriage equality, and this is just a small few that exist today or have existed in not only our nation’s past, but our world’s past as
well.
What makes a law just or unjust? Because truly every law could be deemed unjust by any group or individual. For instance, a law of the amount of alcohol you can drink before you drive is .08%, in Utah. That law could be deemed unjust to the individuals who feel they can drive safely well above that limit. Also, lawmakers in California just approved one of the toughest mandatory vaccination requirements in the nation (McGreevy and Lin II). There are groups of people who choose not to vaccinate their children, either due to religious, medical, or personal preferences that would deem this law unjust. However, the key to these two examples of laws that could be deemed unjust is, these laws are created to protect our fellow human beings. Having a limit to how much you can drink before you drive protects those against those who decide to drive at what they think is an okay level, but are actually not. Having a law passed that every child should be vaccinated in order to attend public schools protects the children and people around them from various deadly diseases that vaccinations prevent.
Even today we are faced with unjust laws and continue to fight against them. For instance we just saw the removal of another unjust law today. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage to be legal across the whole nation. I am proud to live in a time to see such monumental changes, but know there is still so far to go. Just when I start to think we have achieved so much and have come so far, something will happen to completely knock me off my feet and get a quick realization that we still have so much more to do and miles to go, especially when it comes to race. The percentage of incarceration rates for our fellow black human beings is staggering. The number of black men and women that are incarcerated makes up nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million people that are incarcerated. They are incarcerated nearly six times the rate of white people (NAACP). Knowing these numbers is clear evidence that we are still facing unjust laws or unjust execution of just laws still today.
It is our duty to our fellow human beings on this Earth to fight against these laws.
To practice our right of civil disobedience to protect each other when the other is not being protected by their government and those who should be protecting them. For if we do not, we could potentially see to the atrocities that were experienced in Germany during the Holocaust happen again. For that was an unjust law that was allowed to go to horrifying measures. Martin Luther King Jr. is absolutely correct when he states that the biggest threat to progress are those who prefer negative peace (534) and are complacent to the injustices they see around them. We must not be
complacent.
The nature of society as we see it today and really how it has always been, is that there will be groups of people that have intentions to degrade another group of people. Some of these people are our lawmakers or enforcers who have the power to harm these groups on one form or another with unjust laws or using just laws in a negative way. It is our duty as sharers of this planet to protect those groups. We need to help fight the “degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness” that these groups experience (King Jr.). If we remain complacent, history has shown how far this degradation and these evil intentions can go.