rules-lawyer

English

Verb

rules-lawyer (third-person singular simple present rules-lawyers, present participle rules-lawyering, simple past and past participle rules-lawyered)

1. Alternative form of rules lawyer.
   • 2014, Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart (The Laundry Files), New York, N.Y.: Ace Books, →ISBN, page 334:

     And the pencil-necked geek is a fully juiced-up young vampire who has rules-lawyered himself around to some very interesting conclusions about his own freedom of action within the constraints Basil specified, and who is extremely pissed off right now because he has third-degree burns across most of his face.

   • 2021, Marie Brennan, New Worlds, Year Four: More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding, Book View Café, →ISBN:

     Saladin, when fighting against the Crusades, famously rules-lawyered his way around this to kill the (richly deserving) Raynald of Châtillon, by giving water to his other prisoner, who then gave it to Raynald.

   • 2021, Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota), Tor Books, →ISBN:

     But as horrors made colony a dirty word, the Age of Empires gave way only to an Age of Excuses, when superpowers learned to rules-lawyer Justice, Democracy, even Freedom and Revolution into pliable excuses to meddle wheresover^[sic] on the globe they smelled profit, but when less-profitable peoples begged for aid, poisoned by the superpowers’ fumes, and lies, and cruel investments, then the powers hid like children in the pillow-fort of their so-modern and so-rational directive not to interfere.