Justice & Law Quote by Terence

Law, in Terence's hands, isn't the serene voice of order; it's a weapon that gets sharper the more "perfectly" it’s used. "Extreme law is often extreme injustice" lands because it flips the usual civic piety on its head. The line refuses the comforting idea that harshness equals seriousness. Instead it suggests a darker truth of institutions: rules don’t become fairer when they become purer. They become less human.

Terence is a comic playwright, which matters. Roman comedy runs on collisions between rigid authority and messy domestic life: stern fathers, scheming slaves, young lovers boxed in by reputation and inheritance. In that world, "extreme law" is the parent, the magistrate, the social code that claims moral clarity while ignoring circumstance. The subtext is less "laws are bad" than "when you treat law as an absolute, you stop seeing people". Extremity reads as a kind of moral laziness: the comfort of one-size-fits-all punishment, the thrill of being right, the bureaucratic alibi that says, "I had no choice."

Historically, Terence is writing in a Roman Republic obsessed with status, property, and public order, where legalism could be both a civic virtue and a tool for maintaining hierarchy. Comedy could smuggle critique past defensiveness: make the audience laugh at the very mechanisms they depended on. The intent is pragmatic and political at once: a warning that legitimacy erodes when law becomes performance - cruelty dressed up as principle. The punch of the line is its realism: extremity isn’t a safeguard against injustice; it’s often how injustice learns to sound official.