(Also pedantic, but it’s not the entire city: there’s a Manhattan eruv that covers a large part of Manhattan, while Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx have separate smaller eruvim.)
> following the law of the highest of high courts to the letter.
but I don't think that "there is no 'high court' at all" is one, for believers.
It also has a status page! https://eruv.nyc/
Like a lot of the rules are very fuzzy in their origin. The whole kosher business comes from a passage about "Not boiling a kid in it's mothers milk". I think most people would interpret that much more literally and you couldn't kill a child goat (kid) and boil it in it's mothers milk; and probably also extend it to other animals like cows. But I'd still think that killing a kid and putting a slice on cheese on the meat would be fine.
So if somebody is going to be obtuse with what you can do it seems like it'd be good fun to figure out all the ways around it.