Sophomore engineering and materials science major

“You’re killing me! Please use the sidewalk.” Those were the words students read each day last semester when a small patch of grass between the Ellicott and Denton communities became a battleground. Students insisted on taking the most direct and efficient route to their dorms — through the grass — but the university resisted them with all its might — a plastic fence and a paper sign.

It began when daring students ventured across the hypotenuse of the two sidewalks and blazed a new trail. The university then rose to the grass’s defense, erecting barriers and replanting the weary grass. For a while, it looked like the university had won, but when the fence disappeared, students quickly gained the upper hand, triumphantly traversing and trampling the new grass. It was dead within a week. Spring break came, and all wondered how and when the university would regroup for its counterattack.

The counterattack did not come; instead, students found a white flag  — a newly paved sidewalk. The university had caved, and even took the very path of students’ defiance as the guide for its new policy. It could not stop people from walking between the two sidewalks, so it decided to at least relegate students to one approved path.

We often hear arguments for matters of public policy, ranging from recreational drugs to abortion that make a similar claim: If the government cannot enforce its laws, it ought to eliminate them. The classic case is the Prohibition era, when the government’s ban on all alcohol could not be enforced and moonshiners everywhere defied it.

In the end, the law had to be changed because it was doing more harm than good, giving business to organized crime and busying police who could have been dealing with more important matters.

Certainly, there are times when the government should change laws that are widely disobeyed; the civil rights movement clearly shows this. But the discriminatory Jim Crow laws were not ended merely because civil disobedience made them impractical; they were eliminated because this disobedience highlighted how unjust they were and, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “an unjust law is no law at all.” It is people’s duty to disobey unjust laws, but this does not mean that all disobeyed laws are unjust.

There are plenty of laws people will always disobey to some extent. Murders are prevalent in Washington and Baltimore, but I’m sure most of us would not want to reinstate Burr-Hamilton-style duels. Likewise, shoplifting is common, but no one would expect a store to respond by offering certain merchandise for free.

Although murder rates and shoplifting cases might decrease if duels and “free-stuff” aisles were implemented, more people would die and more stuff would be taken without profit for the store. Furthermore, some murders and shoplifting would inevitably continue because some people would want to go beyond legal limitations.

Widespread disobedience is not a sufficient condition to get rid of a law. Just laws exist in order to protect the right of citizens and to further the common good of a society; if people disobey laws that do in fact serve these purposes, the solution is not to reduce the laws but to increase enforcement.

Arguing that a law shouldn’t exist because people will disobey it is simply a distraction from the really important question: Is the law just? Sometimes the policy is unjust and the sidewalk should be built, but that is because of the Pythagorean Theorem, not the trampled grass.

Matt Rice is a sophomore engineering and materials science major. He can be reached at matthew.rice.d@gmail.com.