What a name for a rebellion — Malheur, which means misfortune. It is the name of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge where the sons of Cliven Bundy and one hundred or more militia members are holed up. They reportedly are vowing to stay for years in protest against the jailing of two Harney County, Oregon, ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son Steven, who own a ranch adjacent to the refuge and want to assert their property and grazing rights.

What a cornucopia of constitutional questions is being opened up by this case, an escalation of the unrest that has been simmering in the West for decades. A progressive watchdog, the Southern Poverty Law Center, offers a timeline of this chapter in American history, warning of the involvement of racist and anti-Semitic elements. We wouldn’t want to gainsay its concerns. But neither would we want that danger to obscure the importance of what is being called the Sagebrush Rebellion.

We wrote about this in April 2014, during the standoff between the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government over grazing fees. It struck us then that Mr. Bundy was writing himself into history alongside Daniel Shays, who rebelled against taxes to pay for the Revolution, and the distillers of Western Pennsylvania, who mounted another tax revolt, known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Right or wrong, we suggested, Mr. Bundy’s rebellion was as American as pie made of apples.

The rebellion in Harney County, home of the Malheur Refuge, centers on what strikes us as a miscarriage of justice — the sentencing to five years in prison of Hammond and his son. This was for “arson,” meaning using the long-time practice in the Oregon outback of setting fires to block against encroaching wildfires (threatening, in this case, the Hammonds’ livestock feed) or, in the case of one of the charges brought against the Hammonds, to block invasive plants.

The Hammonds laid out the basic facts in their bid to get heard at the Supreme Court. In the first fire, which was lit in 2001 and is known as the Hardie-Hammond, the jury found the Hammonds guilty but acquitted them of causing more than $1,000 in damages. They were acquitted of all charges in a 2006 fire, called the Lower Bridge, but Steven was convicted for the Krumbo Butte fire that consumed an acre of public land. He was acquitted of causing more than $1,000 in damages.

The jury acquitted his father of all charges in the Granddad Fire the same year. It failed to reach a verdict on his son, who, in any event, was given a judgment of acquittal in respect of witness tampering. At sentencing, the judge, Michael Hogan, floored the government by refusing to apply a “mandatory minimum sentence” that he reckoned was “grossly disproportionate to the severity of the offenses.” He also refused to apply the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

“When you say, you know, what if you burn sagebrush in the suburbs of Los Angeles where there are houses up those ravines? Might apply. Out in the wilderness here, I don’t think that’s what the Congress intended. And in addition, it just would not be — would not meet any idea I have of justice, proportionality. I am not supposed to use the word ‘fairness’ in criminal law. I know that I had a criminal law professor a long time ago yell at me for doing that.”

“And I don’t do that,” said Judge Hogan, who sits at the District of Oregon. “But this” — a mandatory minimum sentence — “it would be a sentence which would shock the conscience to me.” So he gave the father a few months and the son a year in prison. The government appealed. The Hammonds lost, and they will have to serve a radically longer stretch than the trial judge thought fit.

This is what the Bundy sons showed up to protest. The Hammonds say that they want no part of the protest, and the local sheriff accuses the protestors of wanting to overthrow the county and federal governments. If that’s their cause, we’re not with them. They’d be misfortunate sons, indeed. But for those of us who hearken to the school of economic thought known as public choice theory, which sees government as the competitor of private enterprise, this story is an American classic.