The D.A.'s office was using an arcane tool of the law — a little-known but highly consequential instrument called a "material witness" statute — to jail Singleton until she testified in court about the cell-phone incident.
Besides, even if the cost could be known, what the philosophers call "consequential" justifications -- that 25 million people will live better -- run smack against "deontological" objections, namely that good consequences cannot justify killing people.
If the reading passages on each test were culled from each grade's specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call "consequential validity" — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education.
It is common to distinguish between cases of basic deviance and consequential deviance (also called primary and secondary deviance).
Morgan, like many who took on Reagan before him, struggled with where he stands not so much on the Reagan presidency (which he calls "consequential"), but on his own opinion of Ronald Reagan.
One says that humans are more likely to judge an act of commission — for instance, a referee's calling a penalty — to be intrusive or consequential than they are an act of restraint.
We are entering the second decade of the 21st century with 40-year-old tactics; it is quite the understatement to call such consequential thinking a disservice to ourselves.
Peter Schjeldahl, of this magazine, called him "the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties".
ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago Hiram Johnson, one of the most consequential governors in California's history, called a special election.
She calls the animal her "consequential visitor," a term that also applies to Frida, a pushy but helpful woman who appears one day, claiming to be a home aide paid by the government.
