Peaceful resistance to laws positively impacts a peaceful society by providing a peaceful way to bring about change. In order to be a truly free society, citizens must actually have the right to peacefully protest laws, and if those opposing the law accept the full consequences of their illegal, but peaceful, actions, then they are not hurting society, but in fact working to improve it.
There are different ways that people can go about attempting to change the laws that they believe are unjust, and peaceful civil disobedience is one of the least harmful of all the possible methods. Riots and violent protests in opposition to unjust laws are much more harmful to a free society than civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is also likely to be more effective, because violent protesters often detract from the progress of their cause, because the people who oppose the cause are able to support their own position by citing the violence as evidence that the protesters are wrong, even if they are protesting an unjust law. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, is meant to lead to negotiation. In the words of Dr. Martin King Jr., the goal of civil disobedience is to "create such a
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More recently, people shut down streets around the United States in protest of the election of Donald Trump. Sometimes these protesters have been successful in changing the injustice they perceive, sometimes they have not, but civil disobedience is usually successful in bringing attention to the cause. The protesters who were in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline engaged in civil disobedience, and this had led to at least temporary success, as the Army Corp of Engineers announced that it will look for an alternative route that will not damage the reservation of the Sioux