awful but lawful
awful but lawful is the alternative form of lawful but awful.
Meaning of lawful but awful
Phrase
lawful but awful
- Morally questionable but legally allowed.
- For example, consider the “lawful but awful” shootings plaguing black communities across the country. If public safety requires a police force that is given carte blanche to brutalize its citizens, the government should have to state so on the record and defend its reasoning.2020 June 23, Tahir Duckett, “The Hidden Constitutional Costs of the Carceral System”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 23 Jun 2020
Questions about awful but lawful
- What is awful but lawful the alternative form of?
- Awful but lawful is the alternative form of lawful but awful.
Words near awful but lawful in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: awful but lawful (page history and authors); lawful but awful (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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