militate

Both are honorable choices, but judging is practical work with real-world consequences, and it is done under conditions that may militate against scholarly purity.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 2, 2026

What if U.S. domestic concerns militate in favor of amending the legal structures of those countries?

From Barron's ● Nov. 19, 2025

"And it's ridiculous that he wants to call E. Jean a liar when the facts militate toward the truth, which is what she said happened."

From Salon ● Jan. 17, 2023

Meyer noted that if he were a chief security officer of a company with ties to Ukraine, “I would militate rather strongly to unwind my exposure.”

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 23, 2022

Examples include the rules that govern punctuation, complex forms of agreement, and fine semantic distinctions between uncommon words like militate and mitigate and credible and credulous.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

Before Callais, courts used a disparate-impact analysis that militated toward concentrating minority voters so that they could elect representatives based on their share of the population.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 17, 2026

Though they recognized the antebellum nation as configured in such a way that militated against their social advancement, Hosea Easton, for example, claimed that Black people were “constitutionally Americans.”

From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024

That overseas service, as well as the nation’s continuing financial involvement in postwar reconstruction and reparations militated against isolationism and underlay the international engagement that Henry Luce in 1941 would label “the American Century.”

From Time ● Nov. 9, 2015

For decades, the movie-music community has militated against such methods, and understandably so; they have undercut the livelihoods of hundreds of Hollywood musicians.

From The New Yorker ● Feb. 27, 2015

But several things militated against my starting to work.

From "Native Son" by Richard Wright

They sprang into action, “being vocal, agitating, militating, marching, doing all that great stuff,” Antoinette Coakley, one of the students, recalled recently.

From New York Times ● Mar. 20, 2022

Lord Justice Popplewell stated "the factors militating against a prosecution in this case outweigh the factors in favour of a prosecution".

From BBC ● Jan. 24, 2022

But there were forces militating against taking the plunge, even beyond his inhibitions.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018

We’re trying to hire the best, aware that there are forces militating against us.

From Economist ● Aug. 15, 2017

As he saw that the very excess of his emotion was militating against him, by restoring us more to our old relations, he became still more demonstrative.

From Dracula by Bram Stoker