Against the law as villain: disobedience, narratives and moral judgement in legal education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22187/rfd2026n60a5Keywords:
disobedience, legality, counter-narrative, pedagogical natural lawAbstract
This article problematizes how certain readings of the natural law tradition, widely disseminated in legal education, tend to glorify disobedience through a simplified interpretation of figures such as Antigone—associating her with natural law theories—against Creon, identified with legal positivism (Zagrebelsky, 2004, 2008). The exaltation of the transgressive hero, while powerful, risks establishing a dichotomous view where obedience equates to submission and disobedience to a superior moral conscience. The text proposes dismantling this simplistic opposition by recovering the value of legality as a democratic form: a general, contestable, and predictable regulatory framework that constitutes a condition for collective life. Drawing on Kohlberg's moral psychology, it shows that both obeying and disobeying can be ethically valid, depending on the principles underlying the decision. Sophocles' tragedy is reread through the notion of counter-narrative: Creon is not a mere villain, but the embodiment of a legal rationality whose confrontation with Antigone reveals the complexity of the conflict. By making these dilemmas visible, literature offers a formative tool to critically rethink these uses in legal education, moving beyond simple oppositions between law and justice.
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