Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law

A woman sees a child fall down a well, so she climbs a fence onto private property to save the child’s life. In the unlikely event that the woman were charged with criminal trespassing, her attorney would use a choice-of-evils defense, also known as a necessity defense, to get her acquitted. He would argue that the child faced an immediate physical threat, and that it was necessary for his client to break the law in order to prevent the child from dying. But what if the threat were something less discrete than a well—the air, the water, the very ground beneath our feet? What if it imperilled every child in a neighborhood, or on the planet? Would the necessity defense still hold?

A group of pipeline protesters in Boston’s
West Roxbury neighborhood gave new life
to an old legal strategy.

Last week, in a Boston municipal courthouse, thirteen defendants brought that question before Judge Mary Ann Driscoll. They had been arrested, in 2016, while protesting the construction of a high-pressure natural-gas pipeline in the neighborhood of West Roxbury, and claimed that their acts of civil disobedience—trespassing, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest—were necessary to forestall both local and global threats. In their testimony to Driscoll, some of the defendants focussed on community safety. The pipeline route, they noted, went through densely populated streets, past an active quarry where bedrock is regularly blasted. According to calculations made for comparable pipelines, an explosion could incinerate an area of at least thirty city blocks. Others discussed rising greenhouse-gas emissions and the harm that climate change is inflicting on people around the world. Driscoll listened to the defendants silently and, after the last one testified, announced that she found them not guilty—that their actions were justified by reason of necessity. She acquitted them without so much as an administrative fee.

Read Carolyn Kormann’s story from The New Yorker - “Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law.”