What is the Definition of summum jus summa injuria?

Answer 1

"Extreme right is extreme injury."

Put another way, a lot of people view the law as inflexible. If the law was always enforced literally per its terms, widely varying circumstances might be treated the exact same way, and we know there are varying degrees of behavior and eventualities that would make it unfair to do so.

For example, let's say that in case of a homicide the only crime that one could be accused of was what we call murder (some places call it murder in the "first degree" meaning you really really meant to kill someone regardless of the reason) and the only punishment was death by lethal injection, and NO defense like self defense was available.

Then someone who is driving down the street and defensively swerves to avoid a jay-walker, but then is practically unable to avoid colliding with a bus and the bus driver is killed, would be considered guilty of murder with no way to avoid the death penalty.

In a society that rigid, it is highly conceivable that human activity would be so thwarted by fear of legal retribution that any kind of normalcy as we know it would be suppressed, or people would be tempted to lie about events to avoid either being found guilty themselves or attributing guilt to others that would perpetuate the system.

That kind of societal control is not unlike the kind of control that a totalitarian government attempts to exert over its citizens, whether it is the extreme right (fascism like the Nazis in Germany) or the extreme "left" (such as communism as practiced in especially in the early days of Fidel Castro's Cuba).

It can also occur in a theocracy (government ruled by a religion) where the religious laws are that strict; on the one hand it leads to "equality" of treatment but constriction of the bounds of personal liberty in particular. This is why even while the Ten Commandments includes the law "You shall not kill", subsequent passages and writings indicate that it is only what we consider murder or manslaughter as punishable (potentially without excuse).