by John C. Gregory

Created on: October 27, 2008

You're Not the Boss of Me: Law-Breaking in America

Although the reasons for widespread law-breaking are as numerous as they are varied, the driving momentum behind this phenomenon has a relatively simple pathology. The genesis is in the principles of democracy itself. Locke, Jefferson, and other Enlightenment thinkers stressed that democratic societies were subject to the sovereignty of the individual. By itself, this notion seems to invite anarchy, but these men were creatures of different times. Religious belief and faith in God had a continuous presence in America from the earliest settlers, and any Enlightenment philosophy was usually digested by most populations with an equal measure of piety. Hence the Declaration of Independence bases its argument on eternal rules of "Nature and Nature's God." Here, individual sovereignty is a relative notion, subordinate to the absolute sovereignty of the Supreme Being.

Harvard professor Michael Sandel has written convincingly that republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison viewed laws as means of cultivating civic virtue. Good citizens require little management, regulation, or supervision. Accordingly, if laws are effective at inculcating thrift, hard work, respect for private property, etc., they can be relatively few in number, fitting well with libertarian beliefs. Running for President in 1800, Jefferson denounced laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts as top-down threats to individual sovereignty, and advocated only those that would instill positive traits conducive to self-government (it must be added that, as president, he did not always live up to this ideal). Understanding freedom in terms of self-government, as opposed to self-indulgence, is essential if law is to retain its moral authority.

The growth of the United States, in both population and economy, gave rise to competing legal philosophies, the dominant of which Sandel refers to as the "procedural republic". Advocates of this view believe that any character building should be completely divorced from law. The main purpose of our statutes and codes, they contend, should be managing people of diverse views and backgrounds equitably. While this has a certain appeal in our multi-cultural society, the value-neutrality of this school of thought makes a robust defense of any particular law that much more complicated. In theory, this kind of jurisprudence is in step with the sovereignty of the individual. Yet, as Canadian political theorist David Koyzis has written, the doctrine of individual sovereignty can make for too many sovereigns before whom the courts and legislatures must bow. This is the crux of the issue: laws based on equitable management eventually breed contempt, because too many citizens see the proposed equity flowing away from them rather than toward them. From the Internal Revenue code to speech codes to gun control to traffic ordinances, people feel justified in ignoring these rules because their perceived autonomy (a democratic right?) is threatened.

So it can be reasonably concluded that laws are disobeyed because of the prevailing public philosophy. Indeed, many who seek to write, execute, and interpret the laws of our country and localities, gain office by telling voters that they are being denied something that should be theirs by right. When they attain the office which they had sought, and begin to implement their programs, still another wave of the wronged will then spring up, disrespecting any statute or that ordinance that makes no sense. And so the cycle continues.

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