MEANING
Giving excessive weight to legal rules or precise wording at the expense of broader purposes or principles.
Use it for
criticizing reliance on formal compliance alone; distinguishing lawful conduct from an overly rule-bound approach; analyzing how attention to wording obscures substantive purposesIdentifies excessive focus on legal formalities, not simply compliance with law. Academic functions: Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- a legalistic approach
- a legalistic interpretation
- legalistic reasoning
On the page
The review criticizes a legalistic approach that treats formal consent as the only ethical consideration.
A legalistic interpretation may satisfy the wording of a rule while frustrating its stated purpose.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- legalistic
Usage notes
Attributive or predicative. More legalistic and most legalistic are natural. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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