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

It is, they argue, based on casuistry, which gets a bad rap but historically was the idea that the ethics of a situation are based on the specifics of the actual case.

From The New Yorker ● Jul. 16, 2018

Some children seem to be too fond of casuistry.

From The Moral Instruction of Children by Felix Adler

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

Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices."

From The Valley of Decision by Edith Wharton

Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries, cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian gallery.

From Complete Short Works of George Meredith by George Meredith

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