This article provides a fresh interpretation of John Rawls's discussion of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press 1971). It focuses on an original feature in Rawls's analysis: civil disobedience as a form of speech deployed by a well-defined minority in an effort to correct an injustice perpetrated by a majority. For Rawls, civil disobedience as a speech function departs from the principle of protected free speech. Only certain expressions of civil disobedience are capable of producing genuine legal reform. Rawls gains new importance as part of a larger effort to understand and evaluate the outbreak of recent movements of mass dissent and protest from the Arab Spring to Ukraine to Hong Kong to the United States. A reconsideration of Rawls may be used to assess the likely success of these various expressions of dissent and protest.

Rawls's discussion of civil disobedience circumvents arguments in the legal literature that attempt to justify certain types of illegal activity with reference to moral conscience or natural law. Nevertheless, the focus on civil disobedience as speech encounters forms of coercive, resistant public opinion in the public sphere. Detailed, exemplary narratives by Martin Luther King and Norman Mailer on acts of civil disobedience illuminate forms of coercion that must be considered in extending and re-evaluating Rawls's original contributions.

In 2016 Daragh Murray published his book Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Armed Groups (Hart 2016). By way of distinction from many other contributions on this widely discussed topic, Murray tries to provide the reader with a complete overview of the legal framework that enables armed groups to acquire international legal status, and preferably outside the framework of armed conflict. He walks the reader through the path of international legal personality, leading towards the acknowledgement of armed groups as addressees of the law. Murray's attempt is courageous, interesting and innovative, but it has its shortcomings. These include his reliance on international criminal law as a source for defining armed groups, and his insistence on stepping outside international humanitarian law. Nonetheless, his contribution is essential for those who wish to include even more armed groups on the international plane.