WHEN IS SOMEBODY JUSTIFIED IN BREAKING THE LAW?

I believe that a person is justified in breaking the law when it would be saving a person’s life. Often a law is enacted to protect people and in some circumstances it can have the opposite effect. For example, if a person has been wounded or hurt with a life threatening injury and someone is driving them to the hospital, the driver may need to exceed the legal speed limit to get the injured person to the hospital as soon as possible. Every minute counts for this person’s life and a one or two minutes delay in getting to the hospital may make the difference as to whether that person dies or lives.

Another situation which may be argued as a legitimate reason to break the law is for an attorney who has attorney-client privileged information. You may have an attorney who has a confessed killer for a client and has informed him that he plans to kill others. I think that in this situation it would be acceptable for the attorney to break the law and reveal this information that could save someone else’s life.

There are people who will argue that it is never acceptable to break the law. There are so many laws that are created for one purpose and actually end up being a bad law that protects the criminal instead of the protecting the citizens. I believe that if failing to break a law would put someone’s life in danger then that law should be broken. For example, if a child and a mother are being beaten by their husband/father and the court fails to keep the father/husband away then I feel that the mother has every right to take her child and go into hiding (which would be against the law and probably considered kidnaping). In this case, the safety of the child is more important than the law which allows the father partial custody of the child.

I believe that laws are designed to protect the people of this country however, they are not a