RESIST BAD LAWS

In reference to your April 14 editorial "One lousy message," regarding Yale
University's reimbursement of students who lose financial aid because of
convictions for drug possession:

With your strident view that flouting the law is irresponsible behavior,
you ignore the possibility, no, the certainty that not all laws made by
mere humans are good ones, and according to basic principles of free
societies, bad laws are to be resisted as a public duty, especially when
lawmakers cannot be persuaded to change them in a timely manner.

American constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel went so far as to say:

"We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and
wrong. ... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it
conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to
bad laws, and to disobey them."

Now, you may believe present federal drug laws are good ones, but that is
far from generally agreed today. That institutions of higher learning in
the United States are now as a matter of principle beginning to resist what
many perceive as ill-considered drug law is to be welcomed, not condemned
as irresponsible.

Perpetrators of atrocities have always and everywhere stated that they were
merely "following the law." Beware aligning yourself with them.

Peter Webster

Auvare, France