pseudolegality

alternative pseudo-legality

1. uncountableThe appearance of legality of something that is not actually legal; The use of courts, police, or legal procedures to accomplish pseudolegal results.

   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

   2 more examples

   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

   In this phase when the National Socialist regime was still attempting to consolidate its power, the pseudolegality of the entire procedure was both an essential feature of totalitarian rule and an aspect in keeping with the unavoidable consideration given to the foreign policy situation and the attitude of the majority of the population.

   2015, Peter Hayes, How Was It Possible?: A Holocaust Reader