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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Lawfulness

Lawful \Law"ful\, a.

  1. Conformable to law; allowed by law; legitimate; competent.

  2. Constituted or authorized by law; rightful; as, the lawful owner of lands.

    Lawful age, the age when the law recognizes one's right of independent action; majority; -- generally the age of twenty-one years. Also called legal age or age of majority.

    Note: In some of the States, and for some purposes, a woman attains lawful age at eighteen.
    --Abbott.

    Syn: Legal; constitutional; allowable; regular; rightful.

    Usage: Lawful, Legal. Lawful means conformable to the principle, spirit, or essence of the law, and is applicable to moral as well as juridical law. Legal means conformable to the letter or rules of the law as it is administered in the courts; conformable to juridical law. Legal is often used as antithetical to equitable, but lawful is seldom used in that sense. -- Law"ful*ly, adv. -- Law"ful*ness, n.

Wiktionary
lawfulness

n. Property of being lawful, of obeying the law.

WordNet
lawfulness

n. the quality of conforming to law [ant: unlawfulness]

Usage examples of "lawfulness".

Instead of giving me a direct answer, the old hypocrite began a long sermon on the lawfulness of the parental kiss.

Program planners have set a goal of collecting information, confirming identity, providing information about foreign nationals throughout the entire immigration system, and ultimately enabling each point in the system to assess the lawfulness of travel and any security risks.

And the same spirit extended to the realm of astronomy, where the regularities of celestial motions were no longer seen as a choreography of God, but as the working of a vast, endlessly repeating, cosmic machine obeying the mechanical lawfulness revealed by Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and their followers.