For Christina Noriega ’13, civil disobedience is all about justice. The philosophy and legal studies dual major questions the duties of both government and the civil disobedient in her thesis, arguing a common ground of tolerance and fairness from both parties.
“Government ought to recognize protesters are participating in the common goal to promote justice, and, more, persuasively, to promote justice on terms the state already acknowledges,” she says.
Noriega’s thesis draws heavily from the work of philosopher John Rawls. “More than any other theory I encountered,” she says, “Rawls’s justification focuses on the idea that someone may be justified in breaking an unjust law out of respect for the greater legal order. As far as I know, no one has considered Rawls’s theory of civil disobedience in the light of his later theory of the overlapping consensus.”
Noriega’s interest in the intersection of legal studies and philosophy sparked during classes on constitutional law and theory taken her sophomore year.
“I have been fascinated by questions of meaning and foundations of law,” she says. “I think the possibility of breaking the law out of respect for the law presents an important opportunity to think about what law is, the limits of law, and the origins of our commitment to law.”
She was also inspired by her semester abroad in Rome, where exposure to Italian constitutional law enabled her to look past the American legal system and think about law in the abstract.
Noriega has spent her time at Scripps actively involved in the Claremont community; she served as a resident advisor for Kimberly Hall, a tutor at the Writing Center, a research assistant at Claremont McKenna College’s Salvatori Center, and wrote and edited The Claremont Independent.
In the fall, Noriega will pursue a doctorate program in political science at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I’ll miss walking back to my room in the evenings, enjoying our beautiful campus, and thinking how lucky I am to be a student here,” she says. “But most of all, I will miss that feeling I sometimes get after class, realizing that my view of the world has forever changed in some way. It can be overwhelming, yet so invigorating at the same time!”