How to Use de jure in a Sentence

de jure

adverb or adjective
  • This is not a de jure limitation on the court’s majority opinion, to be clear.
    Matt Ford, The New Republic, 23 June 2022
  • The absence of de jure segregation, of furious mobs spitting and screaming at the front door, is heralded as the true test of justice—a low, low bar.
    Eve L. Ewing, The Atlantic, 22 Mar. 2018
  • In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld de jure racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.
    Matt Ford, The New Republic, 17 July 2019
  • Her life was defined by segregation, de facto if not de jure.
    Emily Langer, Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2022
  • After a brutal civil war, which still simmers in a few parts of the country, some of these same people have been de facto or de jure labeled in the West as war criminals — first and foremost among them is Assad.
    David W. Lesch, CNN, 12 June 2021
  • This is a very literal introduction to a film about the evils of de facto and de jure oppression of Black people in America that’s crafted as a high-concept nightmare.
    Lindsey Bahr, chicagotribune.com, 16 Sep. 2020
  • Once Russia has completed the de jure annexation of its conquered lands, re-taking them will become a risky endeavor.
    Grayson Quay, The Week, 2 Aug. 2022
  • Who could deny that slavery, Jim Crow and de jure and de facto segregation were not racist, or would argue that their effects could have disappeared entirely?
    WSJ, 19 Nov. 2021
  • Traveling even short distances can mean encountering fraught borders, de jure or not.
    Seyward Darby, Longreads, 19 July 2023
  • But the reality is that the de jure status was flagrantly violated for centuries de facto.
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 28 Sep. 2011
  • No longer content with maintaining de facto apartheid rule in the occupied West Bank, Israeli lawmakers are moving to establish the de jure variety.
    Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 26 Apr. 2018
  • Implied in this formulation is that China can live with the status quo—a de facto, but not de jure, independent Taiwan—in perpetuity.
    Oriana Skylar Mastro, Foreign Affairs, 3 June 2021
  • The Soviet Union helped establish Israel and was the first country to bestow on it de jure diplomatic recognition, as well as getting satellite Czechoslovakia to supply it with weapons in 1948.
    Yaroslav Trofimov, WSJ, 11 Apr. 2018
  • Would someone please explain de jure versus de facto discrimination to the 71-year old Letterman?
    Nell Scovell, The Cut, 14 May 2018
  • Their descendants continued to carry the torch, not settling for de jure freedom, not settling for sharecropping, not settling for segregation.
    USA Today, 20 May 2021
  • Linda Brown is now being honored both by those who recognize the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education as incomplete, and those who very much want to limit it to its original scope of de jure (as opposed to de facto) segregation.
    Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 26 Mar. 2018
  • Regardless, activist courts ignored the letter of the law at the urging of liberal elites and began signing off on school-integration plans that equated any racial imbalance in classrooms with de jure segregation.
    Jason L. Riley, WSJ, 12 Oct. 2021
  • Today de jure segregation is gone; there are a vast number of non-clerical African-American leaders and role models available; and fighters for racial justice no longer think the color-blind principles of the Declaration are enough.
    Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 15 Jan. 2018
  • Biden in response relied on a 1970s-vintage policy distinction between de jure and de facto school segregation.
    Matthew Yglesias, Vox, 3 July 2019
  • But this fantasy of commonality has always excluded, de jure and de facto, large swaths of the American population on the basis of their identities.
    Sarah Churchwell, The New York Review of Books, 7 Feb. 2019
  • An optimist 40 or 50 years ago might have hoped that de facto segregation would simply fade away over a generation or two, as the formal policies that undergirded de jure segregation were no longer there to support it.
    Matthew Yglesias, Vox, 3 July 2019
  • Today slavery is banned de jure in every locality across the world, and has been predominantly extirpated de facto.
    Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 22 Apr. 2013
  • China has steadily mounted political and military pressure on Taiwan to deter the DPP from making moves toward de jure secession.
    Wang Jisi, Foreign Affairs, 22 June 2021
  • Beyond the legal reasons, the justices also recognized its broader value in a multiracial society with a long history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination.
    Matt Ford, The New Republic, 1 Nov. 2022
  • Redlining as supported by the federal government, segregation in the Army, and de jure segregation in public schools are but a few examples of how institutions have upheld white supremacy.
    Angela Helm, The Root, 22 May 2018
  • More representative of the benshengren majority who feel little attachment to the land of their distant ancestors, the DPP is seen as favoring de jure independence from China.
    William Han, CNN, 15 July 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'de jure.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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