How to Use dead letter in a Sentence

dead letter

noun

• Sign up His deal is already a dead letter in the upper chamber.
  — Grace Segers, The New Republic, 14 June 2023
• Overnight, Roe became a dead letter in the second largest state.
  — CNN, 17 Sep. 2021
• The old agreement, which was negotiated in the ’70s, was a dead letter.
  — Anousha Sakoui, Los Angeles Times, 1 Mar. 2021
• Were these powers beyond the reach of the people’s power, impeachment would be a dead letter.
  — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 2019
• As a matter of reality, Roe vs. Wade is a dead letter in Texas today.
  — NBC News, 5 Sep. 2021
• Our one means of removing bad presidents is a dead letter.
  — Ryan Cooper, The Week, 3 Nov. 2021
• Outside of the Trump Administration and the right wing of the Republican Party, that’s now a dead letter.
  — Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2020
• But if the justices stand by as Texas effectively imposes a ban on most abortions performed in the state, then Roe may already be a dead letter.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 1 Sep. 2021
• The Postal Service identified the dead letter carrier as Mary Granados, 29.
  — Tim Stelloh, NBC News, 2 Sep. 2019
• Mexico’s antislavery laws might have been a dead letter, if not for the ordinary people, of all races, who risked their lives to protect fugitive slaves.
  — Alice Baumgartner, The New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2020
• While insistence on a balanced budget in exchange for debt limit concessions is also a dead letter, steps in that direction need to be part of the discourse.
  — Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Forbes, 8 Sep. 2021
• But the reality is that, because of such misgivings, the border tax probably has been a dead letter for months now, though its proponents haven’t given up.
  — Gerald F. Seib, WSJ, 18 July 2017
• But in practice, this law has been close to a dead letter, at least for Supreme Court justices, because its somewhat vague prohibitions contain no enforcement mechanism.
  — Simon Lazarus, The New Republic, 16 Mar. 2023
• The House has the more plausible theory; the one advanced by Mr Trump’s lawyers would, in effect, render impeachment a dead letter, rather than a valid constitutional remedy.
  — The Economist, 20 Jan. 2020
• For that crowd, American patriotism — love for our creeds of liberty and devotion to the Constitution — is already a dead letter.
  — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 16 Feb. 2018
• But rather than rest its case on tried and true constitutional provisions, the government watchdog asked a federal judge to bring to life, for the first time in American history, the dead letter of the foreign emoluments clause.
  — Cristian Farias, Daily Intelligencer, 19 Oct. 2017
• And Donald Trump’s presidency demonstrated that appeals to racial prejudice were hardly a dead letter.
  — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 4 Feb. 2021
• Another dead letter is obscenity: the idea that something has no intrinsic artistic or literary value and so offends the standards of common decency that it should be censored.
  — Matt Thompson, SPIN, 7 Feb. 2023
• Without one, Section 5 is effectively a dead letter, with dire consequences for the integrity of American democracy.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 11 July 2018
• These laws aren’t just dead letters, either; southern conservative politicians are touting them as a sword against local governments who dare take down Confederate monuments, not just a shield against protestors and defilers.
  — Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, 19 Apr. 2018

Last Updated: 15 Sep 2024