How to Use de jure in a Sentence

de jure

adverb or adjective
  • This is Mira’s—de facto, not de jure.
    — Anna Wiener, New Yorker, 4 May 2026
  • Her life was defined by segregation, de facto if not de jure.
    — Emily Langer, Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2022
  • Israeli lawyers and human rights activists say the move amounts to de jure annexation.
    — Eric Cortellessa/jerusalem, TIME, 13 Aug. 2024
  • This is not a de jure limitation on the court’s majority opinion, to be clear.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 23 June 2022
  • So there's de facto recognition and de jure recognition.
    — NBC news, 10 Aug. 2025
  • Traveling even short distances can mean encountering fraught borders, de jure or not.
    — Seyward Darby, Longreads, 19 July 2023
  • Brown ended de jure segregation for Black children.
    — Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily, 10 Aug. 2025
  • 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
  • But the reality is that the de jure status was flagrantly violated for centuries de facto.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 28 Sep. 2011
  • So, the upshot is that an end to sanctions, de facto or de jure, should see more Russian oil on the market, but not until upstream investment rises.
    — Michael Lynch, Forbes, 20 Feb. 2025
  • But the de facto ceding of territory temporarily is preferable to the de jure handing over of land permanently.
    — Michael McFaul, Foreign Affairs, 27 Aug. 2025
  • The answer would hinge on whether the courts saw northern segregation as de jure (resulting from state action) or de facto (resulting from happenstance).
    — Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor, 25 Feb. 2025
  • The plaintiffs in the 1970 lawsuit argued that the segregation of the Detroit school system was de jure.
    — Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor, 25 Feb. 2025
  • These bills aren’t some bizarre push to allow prisoners to refuse to do any chores but an effort to finally expunge the last vestiges of de jure involuntary servitude and slavery from our system.
    — Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 16 Sep. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • Would someone please explain de jure versus de facto discrimination to the 71-year old Letterman?
    — Nell Scovell, The Cut, 14 May 2018
  • 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
  • Neither Netanyahu nor Biden seem willing or able to slow this determined effort at de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank.
    — Martin Indyk, Foreign Affairs, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Neither Netanyahu nor Biden seems willing or able to slow this determined effort at de facto and de jure annexation of the West Bank.
    — Martin Indyk, Foreign Affairs, 2 Oct. 2023
  • 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
  • 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
  • Biden in response relied on a 1970s-vintage policy distinction between de jure and de facto school segregation.
    — Matthew Yglesias, Vox, 3 July 2019
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Somehow, water contamination and air pollution in poor communities are tantamount to the de jure segregation of schools during the 20th century.
    — Caleb Nunes, National Review, 8 Sep. 2023

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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