Not necessarily correct. As Plato writes in the Crito:
"Reflect now, Socrates," the laws might say, "that if what we say is true, you are not treating us rightly by planning to do what you are planning. We have given you birth, nurtured you, educated you; we have given you and all other citizens a share of all the good things we could. Even so, by giving every Athenian the opportunity, once arrived at voting age and having observed the affairs of the city and us the laws, we proclaim that if we do not please him, he can take his possessions and go wherever he pleases. Not one of our laws raises any obstacle or forbids him, if he is not satisfied with us or the city, if one of you wants to go and live in a colony or wants to go anywhere else, and keep his property. We say, however, that whoever of you remains, when he sees how we conduct our trials and manage the city in other ways, has in fact come to an agreement with us to obey our instructions. We say that the one who disobeys does wrong in three ways, first because in us he disobeys his parents, also those who brought him up, and because, in spirit of his agreement, he neither obeys us nor, if we do something wrong, does he try to persuade us to do better. Yet we can only propose things, we do not issue savage commands to do whatever we order; we give two alternatives, either to persuade us or to do what we say. He does neighter. We do say that you too, Socrates, are open to those charges if you do what you have in mind; you would be among, not the least, but the most guilty of the Athenians." And if I should say "Why so?" they might well be right to upbraid me and say that I am among the Athenians who most definitely came to that agreement with them. They might well say: "Socrates, we have convincing proofs that we and the city were congenial to you. You would not have dwelt here most consistently of all the Athenians if the city had not been exceedingly pleasing to you. You have never left the city, even to see a festival, nor for any other reason except military service; you have never gone to stay in any other city, as people do; you have had no desire to know another city or other laws; we and our city satisfied you."
Civil disobedience is appropriate for individuals, not institutions.
Think of it this way: Ought it be the role of corporations to decide what laws are evil and what laws to follow, or should that it be the role of judges and elected officials to nullify and repeal them? I would rather put the responsibility (and blame) on the latter, not MBA's responding to short-term shareholder interests.
This is the same knee-jerk idiocy as to the Kindle's DRM issue: Amazon is not an institution equipped to decide on the morality of DRM. They're an institution designed to maximize shareholder value. Let the elected officials decide questions of morality, and let the corporations decide how to organize individuals into profit-maximizing groups.
Civil disobedience is appropriate for individuals, not institutions.
You say this, yet oddly you you seem to put little moral weight on individual actions.
If an institution collectively performs an act that is evil, and the law does not act to punish it, do you truly place no responsibility on the individuals who participated? An institution cannot act except via the individuals who comprise it. Diffusion of responsibility is anathema to a moral society; great evil can be performed on behalf of institutions by "good" people when it isn't their "responsibility".
The reality, of course, is that people usually rationalize their way out of being complicit in evil, and in any case are almost never held responsible for their participation, but I don't often hear people promoting that as a good thing!
Morality and law are not equivalent or coterminous for sure, but I'd hardly say they are orthogonal. Do you really think they are completely void of interdependency?
They're orthogonal in that both can vary independently of the other. Making an act legal or illegal does not alter the morality of the act, nor does the morality of an act in a given context change the legality of performing it.
To the extent that you can plot the morality vs. legality of acts on a cartesian plane it's nice to find most points near the diagonal, but that doesn't mean they aren't separate axes.
Doesn't the law tend to follow morality hysterically (ie with hysteresis). Also a weaker point might be that civil disobedience itself could be considered immoral [in some moralities].
