The tension between fundamental human rights and democratic (majoritarian) legitimacy is both critical and analytically rich for contemporary normative theories of democracy – and for the issue of morally acceptable civil disobedience as well. I briefly discuss the challenge this tension raises for three of the mainstream approaches to this issue, namely republicanism, liberalism and deliberative democracy. I move then to a detailed account of the early Rawlsian justification of civil disobedience, and in the third step of my argument I advance the idea that Rawls’ theory of public reason offers a particularly strong framework for understanding disobedience as an effective means for promoting justice and legitimacy in contemporary democracies.
