Treating a court as plural is a fairly common mistake among law beginners: but experts agree that it`s not always that simple. According to Bryan Garner, in the United States, we generally treat collective nouns as a singular unit and use the singular verb. “But if the focus is on the individual in the group, the plural verb form is best.” 1 The editors of Merriam-Webster`s English Usage Dictionary agree: “If the group is considered a unit, the singular verb is used; If it is considered a collection of individuals, the plural verb is used. 2 The key question is whether collective nouns should be treated in the singular or plural. Should we write that the jury is or is the jury? Although a jury, like all collective nouns, is a group of individuals, it is best to treat collective nouns as singular and write to the jury as the board decides, the panel hears, and so on. One. The faculty [as a single unit] thanks the volunteer judges for their support. False: The court must first determine whether they have jurisdiction. Law: The court must first determine whether it has jurisdiction. So if you`re writing about professors in the United States, you could write the following: False: The board had to review the transcript before it could vote.

Right: Council had to review the transcript before it could vote. c. The consultant will examine how staff [as a single unit] in rural hospitals collect and evaluate the performance of physicians with clinical privileges. If collective nouns are generally singular, they should take the pronouns it and ses, not them, them or their own. Aprendizaje personalizado exhaustivo para la educación K-12 Más de 35,000 hojas de ejercicios, juegos y planes de clase Aprendizaje adaptativo para el vocabulario de inglés Haciendo que las experiencias educativas sean mejores para todos. d. Rural hospital staff prepare [individual] performance evaluation reports. By the way, British English is different, and I`m not going to go into it here, except to say that when I watch a football match with British commentators, it`s always heartbreaking to hear them say, “The Chelsea team is very talented.” Collective nouns are usually singular and adopt singular verbs and pronouns. If you think you have an exception, go ahead, but use your best editorial judgment and get a second opinion.

This error may be due to the perception that interlocutory courts of appeal often hear cases in tripartite chambers and that the highest courts often hear cases in nine-person formations. But the Court is a singular entity, regardless of the number of judges. If the author is thinking of judges individually, it would be better to write this: judges must first determine whether they are competent. A common and widely recommended workaround is to use “members” or “members of”, which clarifies the correct verb. So the jury sat in the hallway and the jury members in the hallway. And the board meets on the first Thursday and the board meets on the first Thursday. This workaround is useful, although it results in a slight loss of brevity. As you can see, it can be difficult to decide whether to think about a collective noun individually or individually, and even harder to decide how your reader will perceive it.

Therefore, it is safer to treat collective nouns as singular entities that adopt singular verbs, and to do so consistently in a document. A collective noun refers to a group of people or things. Group, for example, is a collective noun. Legal writers often have to deal with collective names, and here are some of the most common: board, board, court, faculty, government, jury, majority, panel, and staff. When using collective nouns, writers are sometimes faced with questions of subject-verb correspondence and pronoun correspondence. This article discusses both. b. Professors [individually] disagree on the topic of pass-fail courses.