Definition of "legerdemain"

For he in slights and jugling feates did flow, / And of legierdemayne the mysteries did know.

1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie

Chief Justice Roberts does more or less the same thing in dissent: He practices intentions-and-expectations originalism while randomly sprinkling some public-meaning originalism fairy dust over his description of his enterprise, perhaps in the subconscious hope that no one will notice the legerdemain.

2021 March 8, Michael C. Dorf, “Old-School Intentions-and-Expectations Originalism in the Nominal Damages Case”, in Dorf on Law

Certainly, that they are to this day so rife in Italy and Spain, and so scant in Britain, is a shrewd ground to apprehend Legerdemain, and forgery, in the accounts we get of their later Saints.

1673, Gilbert Burnet, The mystery of iniquity unvailed, London, page 128