For example, in Isaiah 10: Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights
[3] He wrote this when discussing why evil exists; his conclusion was that it is ultimately a problem caused by people departing from good or just behavior.
His answer is no; a law only need to be obeyed if it is legitimate in three ways: Aquinas says that the disobedience should not itself cause harm or lead people into evil.
In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau also called into question the legitimacy of any law that was unjust.
He says: “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”Martin Luther King Jr,[5] in Letter from Birmingham Jail, referred to both Augustine and Aquinas, saying that Jim Crow laws were unjust and should be eschewed, in establishing his rationale for the goodness of civil disobedience.