"My sense is that a law or regulation is at best an opening bid. Is it binding, legally or morally? Maybe..."

"... but the presumption should be neutral at best, or, realistically, highly skeptical. After all, laws and regulations are the products of legislators and bureaucrats, who are presumptively corrupt and dishonest. And everybody know that, really."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, commenting on Ilya Somin's "Martin Luther King on the Ethics of Resistance to State Authority/Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan offers a valuable summary of King's thought on these issues." 

Somin's piece is at Reason. Excerpt:

The obvious criticism of views like King's is that many people may have poor judgment about which laws are unjust. For example, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 likely believed that enforcement of the laws against doing so would be unjust, because (in their view) Donald Trump had a right to stay in power. Similarly, both left and right-wing terrorists often believe they are justified in violating laws against murder and assault.

But the risk that individual citizens may be mistaken about matters of justice has to be balanced against the danger that government can be wrong about such things, as well. Even in democratic societies, there is a long and awful history of the latter. Throughout American history, many more people have been killed and oppressed by unjust exercises of government power than by individuals acting on mistaken assumptions about which laws are morally defensible. The toll of slavery and segregation (both imposed by law) alone easily outweighs that of all morally motivated private disobedience to law combined. The extent to which people should defer to the government's judgment on questions of justice depends heavily on how good that judgment is. All too often, the answer is that it is, at best, highly unreliable.

I'm not agreeing with everything I'm quoting. I'm offering it as worthy of contemplation and debate. 

"Even if you believe — as David Bernstein states above — that the election didn’t turn on fraud, you should be concerned that so many people do."

"It’s important... that elections not only be free of fraud, but trusted by the vast majority, even among those who lose. We don’t have that, and the huge number of stories about potential election fraud that were running in mainstream media right up until election day indicates that if Trump had been declared the winner, Democrats would be running around screaming fraud. We need a system that is obviously trustworthy enough that the vast majority of people will trust it, and we certainly don’t have that. Other countries do."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, pointing to this post — also at Instapundit — by David Bernstein. 

From Bernstein's post: "There is no evidence of widespread fraud that could plausibly be said to have cost Trump the election, nor even a single state.... And all that is why Trump’s lawyers lost every single case they brought before judges of all parties and ideologies.... Even if you accept any of the not-completely-crazy theories I’ve seen of how the election was 'stolen,' at best that gets Trump to a narrow victory in the Electoral College. Yet the president continues to insist not just that he won, not just that the election was stolen, but that he won in a 'landslide.'... If the election process is a total fraud, then violence is to be expected. Even in the face of the violence yesterday, Trump, while telling the rioters to go home, also continued to insist that he really won in a landslide, thus continuing to foment violence."