lawful but awful
lawful but awful phrase: morally questionable but legally allowed.
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
- “Lawful but awful happens when you have some kind of situation where the officer feared for their life,” he [Chuck Wexler] said.2021 April 7, Kathleen Foody, quoting Chuck Wexler, “EXPLAINER: Questioning blurs meaning of ‘lawful but awful’”, in Toronto Star, sourced from AP, archived from the original on 07 Feb 2026
Forms of lawful but awful
| alternative form | awful but lawful |
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Questions about lawful but awful
- What does lawful but awful mean?
- Lawful but awful means morally questionable but legally allowed.
- What part of speech is lawful but awful?
- Lawful but awful is a phrase.
Words near lawful but awful in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: 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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