Issue_17_GRE_Writing

There are two types of laws: just and unjust. Every individual in a society has a responsibility to obey just laws and, even more importantly, to disobey and resist unjust laws.

Individuals could disobey, resist and even challenge "unjust" laws in dictatorial society or the society that has none law approach to improve law itself. In today's democratic society, however, there almost not exist distinctly different types of laws: just or unjust. Democratic society often provides people law approach to improve existing laws. In this sense, people disobey or resist laws they consider as "unjust" make little difference to change laws.

Law could be considered as the balance of different competing interests among people, so any law would impair someone's interests and be "unjust" in these people's eyes. People make judgment often on their own perspectives, which sometimes is short-term and selfish. For example, laws about environment protect may be "unjust" for some entrepreneurs, since such regulations require them to limit the chemical material pollution and increase the product costs. Monopolistic companies such Microsoft in information industry may deem the prosecution on it is "unjust". Moreover, judgment based on different cultural tradition would be also different. Abortion is legal in many countries but people in other countries such as U.S. may think it is "unjust" and deem it as a crime to new life. The lesson we can draw from these examples is that making a justifiable discrimination on laws into just and unjust is impractical, as soon as realizing that people with different interests and cultural background cannot make the unique judgment. No laws could reconcile every conflict in society; taking regulations impair one's interest for "unjust" laws just will make conflicts more severely.

It is true that every society has some laws that cannot accommodate the society development and impair major part of people's normal daily life, however, disobeying and resisting laws is not a good solution. Individual actions of just disobeying laws is a passive and ineffective method, to some extend, which could not achieve the goal of reform laws but just harm themselves. Similarly, violent resistance do not present people's actions are reasonable even if they stand at the side of truth. Unless all other possible methods have been used and prove ineffective, violent resistance is not a good choice for people to achieve their wish.

Fortunately, democratic society indeed has legal access to law revision, and the best approach of laws problem is to use legal method. The fairness is not decided by small part of people, but should represent most people's wish. Now that there is legal path for people to express their opinions and argue with others who hold opposite views, which opinion represents most people's interests would be clear. Acknowledgement of the law's revision function is precondition to respecting the authority of laws. If anyone would disobey and resist the so-called "unjust" laws, enacting laws becomes meaningless. Public discussion and argument is one of the best ways to hold the fairness of law, so orderly and stable society needs people to use legal method to refine the law.

In sum, the discrimination between just and unjust for laws is almost groundless, and people should obey and respect laws even if he or she deem certain laws are unfair to them. The appropriate way to solve the problem is to resort to legal methods, and too passive or provocative action actually makes little sense to whole society.