Is It ‘Illegal’ to Urge the Military to Refuse Unlawful Orders?

Time -  The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) says that service members must “obey any lawful general order or regulation.” There is a strong presumption that orders are lawful under military law, according to the NIMJ. But service members are allowed to disobey unlawful orders—and they could even be prosecuted for carrying out patently unlawful orders, such as war crimes.

“They said, ‘Don’t follow unlawful orders,’ and somehow Vance interprets that to mean, ‘disobey everything Trump does.’ That’s not what they said. Legally, he’s wrong,” Fissell says. “It’s not even a logical statement.”

Claire Finkelstein, professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, says that the lawmakers have the right to freedom of speech and “were not in any sense instigating the commission of a crime;” rather, they were simply “stating their interpretation of the law as best they understood it.”