pseudolegality
pseudolegality noun: the appearance of legality of something that is not actually legal; The use of courts, police, or legal procedures to accomplish pseudolegal results.
Noun
pseudolegality (uncountable)
- The appearance of legality of something that is not actually legal; The use of courts, police, or legal procedures to accomplish pseudolegal results.
- Legal theorists began asking in the 1950s how the legal system in the GDR, characterized as it was by a one-party state armed with extraordinary powers, differed from the pseudolegality of National Socialist Germany.2003, Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic, page 12
- One of the devices of all dictatorships is the pseudolegality of the judicial system under which the most grotesque crimes are committed.2015, Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter, →ISBN, page 87
Forms of pseudolegality
| alternative form | pseudo-legality |
|---|
Origin of pseudolegality
From pseudo- + legality.
Questions about pseudolegality
- What does pseudolegality mean?
- Pseudolegality means the appearance of legality of something that is not actually legal; The use of courts, police, or legal procedures to accomplish pseudolegal results.
- What part of speech is pseudolegality?
- Pseudolegality is a noun.
Words near pseudolegality in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudolegality (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudolegality.wav.
Cite this entry: “pseudolegality.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pseudolegality. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.