body corporate

American  

noun

Law.

1. a person, association, or group of persons legally incorporated; corporation.

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body corporate British  

noun

1. law a group of persons incorporated to carry out a specific enterprise See corporation

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Etymology

Origin of body corporate

First recorded in 1490–1500

Example Sentences

Yeardley was to organize the outlying settlements into “one body corporate, and live under Equal and like Law,” his orders said.

From Washington Post

Source: "Guidance regarding the legal obligations placed on forces as body corporate when dealing with speeding and red light offences by emergency service vehicles"

From BBC

In England, an incorporated town that is not a city; also, a town that sends members to parliament; in Scotland, a body corporate, consisting of the inhabitants of a certain district, erected by the sovereign, with a certain jurisdiction; in America, an incorporated town or village, as in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

From Project Gutenberg

Of Webster he said, "His imagination transformed the soulless body corporate—the fiction of the king's prerogative—into a living personality, the object of his filial devotion, the beloved mother whose protection called forth all his powers, and enkindled in his bosom a quenchless love."

From Project Gutenberg

I remember, in particular, once having the misfortune to be acquainted with such a social incubus, to whom a death in the neighborhood was a regular God-send, and to whom the wholesale slaughter made by the collision of rail-cars served as colloquial capital for weeks—indeed until some provident body corporate supplied new material for his cormorant powers of mental digestion!

From Project Gutenberg