A fella named Diogenes (who habitually overrates his own knowledge and intellect, FTR), argued that jury nullification would be helpful in fighting anti-miscegenation laws, for example. To this, King of Soup replied,
Okay, let's imagine a world in which your point of view is the only thing that can prevent the death of a morally blameless black man under an inherently discriminatory law rooted in wrong and racist thinking. Can we also make him a virtuoso violinist and Nobel Prize-winning neurosurgeon who recently saved the governor's niece from an erupting volcano? And can we imagine that instead of being merely killed, he and his whole family and Santa Claus and a bunny rabbit are tortured to death on Christmas Eve? Now we're winning, right?
Wrong. Sorry. You are describing an unjust law and prescribing a "remedy" that destroys the only force around capable of successfully opposing unjust legislation without violence, without ever specifically addressing the law you hate. Your attempt at nullification might be defended as a single isolated humanitarian gesture, but as civil disobedience, it's bunk. It's probably worth remembering (it wasn't that long ago) that legal expressions of racism in the U.S. were mostly fought with the kind of civil disobedience that respected the judiciary and its authority and the constraints under which it works, even as it deplored and disobeyed the laws that branch is expected to enforce. This wasn't collaboration, it was equal parts courage and wisdom: the courts (eventually) led the fight against institutionalized racism, and they could never have done so had well-meaning protestors undermined their authority before the country. Essentially, your artificial (and grossly unrealistic: miscegenation laws were rarely enforced and were never punishable by death) scenario is about the same as constructing hypothetical circumstances under which each single soldier's life might be saved during the course of a war: the hypothesis collapses when subjected to a tiny fraction of the weight of reality, and does nothing to either win or lose or end the war.
Even in a society with some unjust laws, most laws work to protect the orderly functioning of a civil society. People who will never set foot in a courtroom have reason to be grateful for the branch of government created as a brake on executive and legislative authority, and would be wise to direct their protests against certain curtailments of their liberty at the offensive laws themselves, rather than at the institutions guaranteeing their right to do so.
Now it's my turn. Let's say a well-known and respected, white, outright owner of a quarter-million-dollar property who knows all the right people is on trial for an offense that is a slam-dunk conviction with prison time for thousands every year, but he has every reason to expect an acquittal because everybody knows he is just not one of those people whom everybody knows the law was designed to punish. When not dressed up on Halloween as a knight tilting at racism and the obstuction of true love, when nullification is merely another word for "enforce this law against someone else, please, we're middle-class," and when it is crystal clear that nobody is interested in bucking the system, just gaming it, in short, when the scenario resembles reality, is "saving this guy right now" nearly as attractive a choice?
Great answer. I like it.
