A University of Manchester philosopher has received a fellowship to test her belief that the law should offer more protection for protestors.
Dr Kimberley Brownlee from the School of Social Sciences will be a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair during autumn 2008 to research the subject at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
She will assess whether civil disobedience is more or less serious than ordinary offences and will look at whether legal defenses should be available to those who disobey the law.
She has also been invited by the Philosophy Department at New York University to spend the autumn of 2008 as a Departmental Visiting Fellow.
Dr Brownlee will examine judicial decisions across the world which highlight strong disagreement among criminal justice officials about the nature and seriousness of political disobedience.
She said: "There are strong reasons why judges should treat public disobedients more leniently than ordinary offenders, and not only when their objections to law or policy are well-founded.
"Unlike radical protesters or ordinary offenders, public disobedients are conscientiously motivated. Often, their protests serve the interests of society by forcing a necessary reexamination of moral boundaries.
"When breakdowns in the mechanisms for citizen engagement in the decision-making process occur, public disobedience offers one way to rectify these democratic deficits by focusing attention on a neglected issue."
She added: "I hope to show that principled or public motivations generally lessen the seriousness of a breach of law even when the cause championed through the disobedience is poorly founded.
"I wish to test my belief that legal defenses, such as a demands-of- conscientious excuse, should be available not only for private conscientious objection, but also for suitably constrained public disobedience."
