proceduraladj.n.

1876 J. L. Laughlin Anglo-Saxon Legal Procedure in Ess. Anglo-Saxon Law 184 The earliest procedural needs of the Germans seem to have been for debt.

1908 R. Pound in Illinois Law Rev. Nov. 232 The necessity of patient cutting away by the courts of an abatis of procedural obstacles in order to attack the substantive points before them.

1919 H. A. L. Fisher Stud. Hist. & Polit. 52 It includes a reform of the civil, penal, and procedural codes.

1947 Daily Tel. 13 Dec. 1/1 Mr. Marshall, although sure that M. Molotov's words were ‘not seriously designed for consumption here, but for another audience’, said that such procedural methods ‘do not inspire respect for the Soviet Government’.

1956 J. Barth Floating Opera xx. 189 At the time of this story the litigants hadn't yet even begun to try the case on its merits, but were still enmeshed, via their attorneys, in procedural disputes.

1995 New Yorker 8 May 6/2 They saw themselves as personifying an authentic, organic Americanism, the very opposite of the procedural Americanism of laws and legislators and United States marshals.

1956 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. 8 July 25/1 One of the best entries in the increasingly prominent ‘procedural’ school of crime fiction.

1971 J. Gores in ‘E. Queen’ Magicians of Myst. (1976) 162 A new kind of procedural detective story..it uses the dream ‘story-within-a-story’ which antedates even..The Vision of Pierce Plowman.

1991 St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch (Nexis) 8 Sept. 5 d A procedural courtroom drama.

2003 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 16 Feb. 11 Taggart is not a procedural show, it's entertainment. If Taggart was real it would mean there were people getting murdered by poisonous snake bites.

1963 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. 17 Nov. 58/1 This is largely a straight police-procedural.

1965 N.Y. Times Bk. Rev. 26 Dec. 21/1 In Girl on the Run.., Hillary Waugh abandons the procedural for a chase-thriller.

1985 Times 19 Dec. 11/4 First rate procedural with no frills, no sex and real people.

2004 N.Y. Mag. 9 Aug. 52/3 Regular watchers rely on continuity; whether we're watching Deadwood, reality television, or a legal procedural.

1965 I. Scheffler Conditions of Knowl. i. 14 We can speak not only of knowing that but also of knowing how to. . . This fact may be conveniently formulated by labeling the that use propositional and the how to use procedural.]

1974 Cognitive Psychol. 7 305 These results support and encourage a distinction that is sometimes made between operational or procedural memory and semantic or substantive memory.

2002 Sci. Amer. June 68/1 Mishkin..has proposed different neural circuits for memory, including a higher-level corticolimbic circuit for..semantic or cognitive memory, and a lower-level corticostriatal circuit of rather more primitive habit memory that is most often referred to as procedural memory.

1921 Jrnl. Rom. Stud. 11 271 In this respect they derive from Coke who stated English law authoritatively, as the next two centuries chose to think, in terms of our strict law and so procedurally.

1932 C. Eagleton Internat. Govt. vii. 192 International law doubtless confers protection upon an alien as such but procedurally he can invoke that protection only by appealing to his own state.

1963 ‘J. Prescot’ Case for Hearing vi. 89 We'll make the girl a ward of court... Any quick and procedurally easy application to the magistrates' court for permission to marry would be out.

1996 Independent 19 Jan. 6/7 The ITC's award of the Channel 5 licence to C5B in October, which the three unsuccessful bidders..argue was procedurally improper.