casuistry

This casuistry didn’t save him from a painful trial before a “denazification” court after the war.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 13, 2026

His decision for the court, handed down on Wednesday, is an incoherent mess of contradiction and casuistry, a travesty of legal writing that injects immense, gratuitous confusion into the law of equal protection.

From Slate ● Jun. 18, 2025

Hill's casuistry is all too common in memoirs written by or for statesmen seeking to sanitize their own blunders and lies.

From Salon ● May 8, 2021

With his casuistry, Whitman seems intent on convincing himself, more than anyone, that this health regimen will work.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 21, 2017

Such subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.

From Children's Ways by James Sully

It happened in Solnechnogorsk, 35 miles from Moscow and a world away from the casuistries of capitalism.

From Time Magazine Archive

The intricate casuistries of the Jesuits are unfolded in the gravest fashion and without the least exaggeration or burlesque, but with a running comment or rather insinuation of sarcasm which is irresistible.

From A Short History of French Literature by George Saintsbury

When knowledge was a theological philosophy theologians were bound to supply thinking men with “Summæ,” or comprehensive applications and casuistries of it.

From Science and Medieval Thought The Harveian Oration Delivered Before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 by Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt

It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning loyalty.

From The Egoist by George Meredith

He meant to draw attention to His sweeping aside of the Rabbinical casuistries of the law of the Sabbath.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John Chapters I to XIV by Alexander Maclaren