[quuxplusone]

> it doesn't make sense to spend hours papering over a legal agreement with someone who wants to sell seven copies of a book at an anarchist book-fair

Huh, you're right. That's not at all a correct use of the phrase "paper over." There are three more uses, too, vaguer and thus less obviously wrong. I wonder what the deal is.

In this particular sentence, "going over" would fit.

However, in general I think Cory is (mis)using the phrase as if it means "legitimize" or "associate a paper trail with": not just to review the wording but to come up with the wording in the first place. (Not just "going over" but "working up.") I could just barely believe this is the jargon of some lawyerly (sub)culture.

[mindslight]

Several hours later, I'm trying to recover what I was thinking and am having a hard time doing so because I've kind of accepted the sense he's using the term in (ie let's paper over the legal details so that we can focus on things that are actually interesting). I think it was the last use, the one you quoted, that really had me scratching my head. But now that I've adopted the skewed/innovative definition I'm having a hard time re-seeing what I was finding an issue with.

It's perversely horrible if you think about the original meaning of paper in paper over (wallpaper), and imagine legal contracts covering the walls of a room - unfortunately quite close to the "reality" that we find ourselves increasingly operating in.