line drawing

English

Etymology

From line +‎ drawing. First use appears c. 1891. The figurative sense is a deverbal form of the expression draw the line. The exact date of its first appearance is uncertain.

Noun

line drawing (plural line drawings)

1. (art) A pen or pencil drawing consisting only of solid lines.
   • 1916, Drawing for Line Engraving, page 33:

     The line drawing held the entire field until the halftone process was invented, by which an engraving may be made directly from a photograph, a wash drawing, or the object itself.

   • 1974, Arthur Zaidenberg, Drawing All Animals, page 22:

     Line drawing is the ingenious invention of man. Nothing in nature is composed of a simple line.

   • 1994, William A. Berry, Drawing the Human Form, page 46:

     The interplay of the two methods can extend the expressive range of a line drawing.

2. (US, law, figurative) A specific boundary or limit in regard to prescribing the best legal rule.
   • 1958, United States, Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Joseph W. Burns, A Study of the Antitrust Laws, Their Administration, Interpretation, and Effect, page 36:

     Line drawing in these matters of competitive behavior is preeminently a judicial function.

   • 1965, University of Notre Dame, Law School, Natural Law Forum - Volume 10, page 124:

     Line-drawing is the ordinary business of moralists and lawmakers.

   • 1979, United States Congress, House, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Monopolies and Commercial Law, Restoring Effective Enforcement of the Anti-trust Laws Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Monopolies and Commercial Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 2060 and H.R 2204 and Other Proposals ... February 27, March 7, and April 10, 1979, page 403:

     the line-drawing that necessarily takes place is informed by an inquiry into what posture best effectuates the dual purposes of the treble damage remedy

   • 1984, Michael S. Moore, Law and Psychiatry - Rethinking the Relationship, page 66:

     In such line drawing, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, the law has revealed its hidden image of a person: A person is a rational being, a being who acts for intelligible ends in light of rational beliefs.

   • 1990, Jeremy Cohen, Timothy Gleason, Social Research in Communication and Law, page 30:

     This process is frequently described as a "line drawing" or a "balancing" process.

   • 1994, Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 - The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy:

     Everywhere there developed a critique that sought to transform differences of kind into differences of degree and to see the world not as a series of mutually exclusive black-white bright-line boundaries requiring intellectual on-off switches but rather as a series of continua involving shades of gray requiring line drawing.

   • 1996, Kenneth J. Vandevelde, Thinking Like a Lawyer - An Introduction to Legal Reasoning:

     Some lawyers describe the application of law to facts by using the metaphor of line drawing: by adopting a rule, the lawyer draws a line between two categories of factual situations.

   • 2003, Nicholas Bamforth, Peter Leyland (editors), Public Law in a Multi-Layered Constitution:

     Experience in both France and England certainly provides good reason to avoid the sort of fruitless jurisdictional line-drawing that accompanies the existence of separate public law adjudicatory bodies and procedures.

   • 2006, Paul H. Robinson, Michael T. Cahill, Law Without Justice - Why Criminal Law Doesn't Give People What They Deserve, page 109:

     Similar pressure for such clear line drawing exists in every case where an offender has violated the criminal law's rules of conduct but is blameless for doing so because he is entitled to an excuse defense.

   • 2019, Alex Jeffrey, The Edge of Law - Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court, pages 60-61:

     But what is crucial here is the very physicality to the act of line drawing, not as an abstract concept that frames imaginations of inside and outside, but rather as a material process that embeds normative ideals of law and justice.

   • 2024, Harold Hongju Koh, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century:

     By now enacting national legislation designed to encourage judicial decision-making, Congress would support the judiciary in performing its constitutionally assigned task of line drawing.