In Episode 6: we consider the notion of bad laws, in answer to a question from one of the Learners: “Is law always right, are the courts always right, do they always get it right?”- we reviewed some laws that have brough great misery and have been introduced for the wrong reasons with the intentions of the ruling class being served rather than the people. We talk about the ‘The Fugitive Slave Act’ – when in 1850 in the southern states of the U.S they introduced the Law to punish anyone who helped a slave escape with a sanction of a 1,000 dollar fine and six months in prison. We flash forward to the 1950s and recall the Montgomery Bus Boycott when a woman called Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man because the buses were segregated and white people had reserved seating – the boycott went on over a year before the Courts found the segregation unconstitutional. We recall a young fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who had made her own protest by refusing to move, some nine months previously, for which she was taken off the bus and arrested in handcuffs.