Kimberley Brownlee - Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience

(p.iv)

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Principled law-breaking has been a central issue for legal philosophy since the time of Socrates. Among modern liberal writers, conscientious refusal has generally been treated more generously than has civil disobedience, which is not private but public and which aims not only at avoiding complicity with immoral laws but at changing them. Civil disobedience may sometimes be the right thing to do, many argue, but it is not something to which we have a right. In this volume, Kimberley Brownlee upends that consensus. Exploring fundamental issues in the morality of conviction and conscience, she argues that it is actually civil disobedience that has the stronger claim to the protections that liberal moralists favour. She makes a case for legal defences based on the demands of moral conviction and on necessity, contending that, here too, civil disobedience merits special immunity. Civil disobedience is thus not merely a kind of law-breaking whose motivation and consequences warrant mitigation, it is part of a valuable dialogue between citizen and state, a form of political communication to which we do have moral rights, and which should be protected by legal rights. Lucid in argument and bold in vision, Kimberley Brownlees book will force liberals reconsider much of what they take for granted about law and disobedience. Anyone concerned with the authority of law and the justifications for punishment will find familiar problems recast here in a new and illuminating way. Oxford Legal Philosophy is delighted to present this challenging work from one of the most interesting new voices in the subject.

Timothy Endicott

John Gardner

Leslie Green

September 2012