Mark Liberman at Language Log links to a good summary by the Canadian Department of Justice on the use of they as a singular in legal usage.

The use of the singular “they” is becoming more common not only in spoken but in written English and can prove to be useful to drafters in a legislative context to eliminate gender-specific language and heavy or awkward repetition of nouns.
Recommendations

1. Consider using the third-person pronouns “they”, “their”, “them”, “themselves” or “theirs” to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun.

2. Do not use “they” to refer to a definite singular noun.

3. Ensure that the pronoun’s antecedent is clear.

There is a set of excellent examples showing how they can work well in quite specific cases, and other cases where it doesn’t.

It’s not just a question of avoiding gender-specific language – sometimes an indefinite noun includes he, she and it. For example, a person will sometimes cover artificial/legal persons. But there’s a difference between a Canadian legislative drafter with the support of the government website and a European translator into English.

I’ve often felt the need for this in translation of statutes, but in translation you have no chance of redrafting, so the result may be inelegant either way.

Customize a Trabi at www.trabicustomizer.com.

Perhaps a contradiction in terms.

Here’s another example of an asterisk search in Google:

die zwingenden Vorgaben der Richtlinie

The problem is Vorgaben. I usually translate Vorgaben as requirements, but am not really happy with this.

Search:

the mandatory * of the directive

Here are some of the ghits:

requirements
provisions
standards
character
implementation
date
rules

I quite like provisions, although looking at all the examples in my current text, requirements might fit best after all.

Normally I would not search for a solution to Vorgaben in this way, but here I know this expression relates to EU law and there must be an English equivalent.

Of course, I could search the EU website, or I could download and install the huge EU translation memory recently provided. But the thing is, if the expression is contained in a judgment, I know that there will be a number of different translations, not necessarily all good. And I might just as well save the effort and use Google.

If you want more EU hits, add site:eu or site:europa/eu

Now comes XYZ Corp., defendant, who moves the Court to exclude the opinions of Joe Blowhard, on grounds that ABC Corp. failed to disclose ….

the (new) legal writer considers how to do this differently and invites comments, of which there are unfortunately none yet at the time of writing.

What to do in German? In an earlier entry with more on this point, I quoted Romain: ‘es erscheint der Beklagte und lässt sich wie folgt auf die Klage ein’ – obviously this was the defendant. Anyway, one might not phrase this way, but this is the meaning, I am sure – X has entered an appearance and says as follows.

What to do in German has also been discussed on ProZ.com.

Thank goodness for the asterisk search in Google:

den Vollzug eines Gesetzes aussetzen

Search:

suspend the * of a statute

Results:

operation
provisions
running (of a statute of limitations)
application
invalidity
tolling (of a statute of limitations)
implementation
enforcement
proclamation

Operation will suit me today.

I am prepared to believe Times Online that the Pope may not (by law) be Scottish. (I got 80% on the Pope Trivia Test got questions 5 and 9 wrong).

Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560

Wikipedia, however, says the Act has fallen into disuse – certainly it has as far as it excludes the jurisdiction of the Pope in Scotland – and doubts a Scotsman who became pope would be punished. I am sure there would be an even greater jubilation in Scotland than there was in Germany on ‘Wir sind Papst’.