Jury Duty

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Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin Davies revised 4 days ago·#3339
Only version leading to #3367 (2 total)

Maybe juries can be done away with. Not all levels of courts have juries, so they mustn’t be fundamental.

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis HackethalOP, 4 days ago·#3342

mustn’t

Maybe this is the non-native speaker in me, but do you mean ‘can’t’? I thought ‘mustn’t’ means ‘may not’: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/must_not

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Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin Davies revised about 5 hours ago·#3367
4th of 4 versions

This might be a difference in dialect. In New Zealand (and I assume other places, like maybe Australia, UK and Ireland) it is common to use ‘must not’ to mean:

a) ‘ Is forbidden to’ (the meaning you are familiar with),

or

b) ‘necessarily cannot’, usually in a deductive way.

Example: “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he must not be home then.”

This is much more natural to me than “His shoes aren’t here. I guess he cannot be home then.”

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