legalistic

So, the focus on the fairly-dormant but easy-to-understand Crime Bill comes with a real cost: largely ignoring the technocratic and legalistic law that still holds real consequence—the PLRA.

“I think you can make a legalistic argument that something like that is already prohibited,” Berger told reporters in late April.

OTA, of course, is just an NFL legalistic term for “practice,” mostly denoting that the workouts are voluntary and cannot involve full pads or contact.

In the past, most journalists took a legalistic, black-and-white approach to the issue of sexual consent.

Hiding behind legalistic hair-splitting about "states' rights" may have worked in the pre-Dobbs days, when most voters shrugged off such talk as irrelevant and esoteric.