IN a meeting with James I (1603-1625), Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Lord Chief Justice of England, told the king that he could not take the action he contemplated because it would be against the law. Horrified, the king roared: “Do you mean that I am under the law?” Calmly, the Chief Justice observed that while the king ought not to be under any man, he was indeed under the law.

Almost two thousand years before James and Coke, Socrates (399 BC) had been using deductive reasoning and analysis (by asking questions and subjecting answers to rigorous examination) to expose the weaknesses of received opinion and conventional wisdom. The Athenians convicted him of corrupting the youth and sentenced him to death.

Plato recounts the last few hours of his life in one of his “dialogues” (Phaedo). As Socrates awaited execution, his friends surrounded him. They had already bribed the jailer, made arrangements for transportation, and were now urging him to escape from prison. Socrates declined, arguing that the law of the state must be obeyed, even if it was a bad law, for if it became acceptable to disobey it, cities would come to ruin.

In his celebrated essay, ‘Civil Disobedience’, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) maintained that a man of honour must follow his conscience rather than the law, if the two came in conflict, for laws, like the governments that made them, were often wrong and unjust. In such instances, he added, the individual had not only the right but the obligation to disobey and resist the law by all non-violent means within his reach. Fill up the jails, he said, which would force the government to repeal the unwanted law. Thoreau’s reasoning is believed to have influenced the thinking of Mr M.K.Gandhi in India and Rev. Martin Luther King, leader of the black people’s liberation movement in the United States.

James I may have been behind the times in his own country. But, for centuries before and after him in much of the world, rulers have acted from the premise that their word was law. Made for others, it applied to them only if they so desired; they could ignore it when it became burdensome, and in any case they could change it at will.

Civil disobedience is common in our subcontinent, but at the level of official theory, the position of Socrates is the one more generally accepted. If the law is bad or unjust, get it changed through prescribed ways and means, but obey it as long as it remains on the statute books. What about the primacy Thoreau assigns to conscience?

This is indeed a difficult question. We cannot simply dismiss him out of hand. Distinctions between a good law and