Lawyers: Disobedience & Punishment

"The current rhetoric—which sometimes seems to consecrate civil disobedience as the noblest response in the pantheon of virtues—has obscured the nature and consequence of this activity." The speaker at Tulane University Law School was Erwin Griswold, 63, former dean of the Harvard Law School and now U.S. Solicitor General; and he wanted to get one major thought across. "One who contemplates civil disobedience," he said, "should not be surprised and must not be bitter if a criminal conviction ensues. It is part of the Gandhian tradition that the sincerity of the individual's conscience presupposes that the law will punish this assertion of personal principle."

The punishment must come, Griswold said, simply because the law has been broken. "It is the essence of law that it binds all alike, irrespective of personal motive," he added. This is true whether the protester decides "to halt a troop train to protest the Viet Nam war" or "fire shots into a civil rights leader's home to protest integration."

The next day a second voice joined in and spread the message. Speaking at the Syracuse University College of Law, Earl Morris, 59, president of the American Bar Association, echoed Griswold as he said: "Many today seem to be demanding for themselves the unlimited right to disobey law." But "an essential concomitant of civil disobedience is the actor's willingness to accept the punishment that follows." The philosophical "concept has been distorted in these times to justify violence and anarchy. What is reprehensible in these acts is not the end to be achieved, but the methods of achieving it."

Both men readily conceded that such disobedience as the Negro sit-ins had shown once again the value of the practice. In those actions of the early 1960s, said Griswold, "perhaps what mattered was not merely the moral fervor of the demonstrators, or the justice of their cause, but also the way in which they conducted themselves." It was clear that neither he nor Morris thought that today's demonstrators possess much of the dignity and restraint that were in evidence then.