Pettifoggery

He was capable of using lawyerly rhetoric, at times, to the brink of pettifoggery.

Yet even Harlan was to prove capable of grievous pettifoggery on the racial issue.

[Frankfurter's reasoning in Beauharnais v. Illinois] struck Black and the other three Roosevelt appointees who joined his dissent as noxious pettifoggery[.]

The idea that a minor bureaucratic restructuring could have made any difference in the time of Trump reflected how immune bureaucratic pettifoggery is to reality.