Fiat justitia ruat caelum

Alexander, who hoped to hear himself named, was disappointed by an answer that implied that nothing within human power could hurt them, short of a total destruction of nature.

In a similar vein, Theognis of Megara urges "May the great broad sky of bronze fall on my head / (That fear of earth-born men) if I am not / A friend to those who love me, and a pain / And irritation to my enemies.

On the other hand, Horace opens one of his odes with a depiction of a Stoic hero who will submit to the ruin of the universe around him: "Si fractus illabatur orbis, / impavidum ferient ruinae (transl.

Should the whole frame of Nature round him break, / In ruin and confusion hurled, / He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, / And stand secure amidst a falling world.

[6]) In De Ira (On Anger), Book I, Chapter XVIII, Seneca tells of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, a Roman governor and lawmaker, when he was angry, ordering the execution of a soldier who had returned from a leave of absence without his comrade, on the grounds that if the man did not produce his companion, he had presumably killed the latter.

In subsequent versions of this legend, this principle became known as "Piso's justice", a term that characterizes sentences that are carried out or passed from retaliation—whose intentions are theoretically defensible, but technically and morally wrong—and this could be construed as a negative interpretation of the meaning of Fiat justitia ruat caelum according to Brewer's entry on Seneca.

[11] Among the charges brought against him was summary judgment, the crime of sentencing a suspect with undue haste and without proper investigation, thus ignoring the legal procedures of justice.

The maxim was used by William Prynne in "Fresh Discovery of Prodigious Wandering New-Blazing Stars" (1646), by Nathaniel Ward in "Simple Cobbler of Agawam" (1647), and frequently thereafter, but it was given its widest celebrity by William Murray, 1st Baron Mansfield's decision on 8 June 1768, on the case concerning the outlawry of John Wilkes (and not, as is commonly believed, in Somerset v Stewart, the 1772 case concerning the legality of slavery in England).

[18] More recently, Judge James Edwin Horton referred to the maxim when he recalled his decision to overturn the conviction of Haywood Patterson in the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial.

"[20] George Eliot has Mr. Brooke mangle and misattribute this phrase in Middlemarch, where he says, "You should read history – look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing.

"[21] In Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK, the character of district attorney Jim Garrison during the only trial brought in the murder of President John F. Kennedy declares "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall".