*290I agree with the circuit court and the Court of Appeals. Both courts held that Code § 16.1-106.1(F) does not, by operation of law, automatically remand a case to the JDR court upon the withdrawal of an appeal. See Spear v. Omary , Record No. 0064-17-4, 2018 WL 414222, at *3, 6 (Va. Ct. App. Jan. 16, 2018) (unpublished). The statute provides that, unless the circuit court expressly retains jurisdiction, "the case shall be remanded to the [JDR] court." Code § 16.1-106.1(F). In this case, the circuit court did not comply with the "shall" command because the circuit court's order - which Spear's counsel drafted and submitted to the court - did not remand the case. Spear solves this problem by postulating that the court did not need to expressly remand the case. The remand happened automatically. In other words, because the remand was supposed to happen, it did happen.
It seems unlikely that the use of the passive-voice verb "shall be remanded" renders the remand self-executing and thus requires no action whatsoever by the remanding court. At best, this interpretation would be an uncommon usage of that expression and, at worst, it would be an unheard-of usage. Consider, for example, Code § 19.2-324.1, which states that a criminal "case shall be remanded for a new trial" if a "reviewing court determines that evidence was erroneously admitted" at trial "and that such error was not harmless." No one has ever suggested that the mere issuance of an appellate opinion reversing an evidentiary ruling need not be accompanied by a remand order. To be sure, the reason that appellate courts expressly order remands is because remands do not happen automatically. The very word "remanded" presupposes a remanding court ordering the remand.
Good grammar, as well as common usage, should play a role in our interpretation of "shall be remanded" in Code § 16.1-106.1(F). Because courts presume "in the first instance, that the legislature understood the rules of grammar and the use of language," Henry Campbell Black, Handbook on the Construction and Interpretation of the Laws § 55, at 148 (2d ed. 1911), "[w]ords are to be given the meaning that proper grammar and usage would assign them," Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 140 (2012).
"Shall be remanded" is a passive-voice verb, which means that the subject of the sentence, "case," is receiving the action of the verb.1 "Shall be remanded" is also a transitive verb that requires an object upon which the action of the verb is exerted in order to express a complete thought.2 This grammatical structure in Code § 16.1-106.1(F) requires an actor (the circuit court) to perform the action (remanding) upon the subject of the sentence (the case). The actor of a passive-voice verb may be omitted entirely from the sentence, see, e.g. , The Chicago Manual of Style, supra note 1, § 5.115, at 235 (giving "his tires were slashed " as an example of omitting the actor entirely from the sentence), or can be the object of a prepositional phrase at the end of the sentence, see, e.g. , id. (giving "the tree's branch was broken by the storm " as an example of naming an actor by the object of a prepositional phrase and noting that "the subject branch does not break itself - it is acted on by the object storm ").
Here, Code § 16.1-106.1(F) omits entirely the actor of the action "shall be remanded." However, this omission does not mean that the remand occurs automatically. Rather, the omission means only that the actor of the remand is understood from the context of the sentence.3 The case cannot remand itself. An *291actor - the remanding authority - must perform the remanding. In this case, however, the circuit court, as the remanding authority, did not remand the case to the JDR court.
Even if common usage and grammar both fail us, the last phrase of Code § 16.1-106.1(F) finishes the interpretative task. That phrase adds that "the case ... shall be subject to all the requirements of § 16.1-297." Code § 16.1-297 requires the circuit court to file a copy of its "judgment" with the JDR court within 21 days after the entry of a "final judgment upon an appeal from the [JDR] court." And where, as here, an appellant files an uncontested withdrawal request in the circuit court, Code § 16.1-106.1(C) directs the circuit court to "enter an order disposing of the case in accordance with the judgment or order entered in the district court."4 That circuit court order "disposing of the case" under Code § 16.1-106.1(C) is the "final judgment" to which Code § 16.1-297 applies under Code § 16.1-106.1(F). See, e.g. , Fairfax Cir. Ct. R. 2:28 (stating that if the circuit court approves of the withdrawal of an appeal, "the Circuit Court will enter an order reaffirming the judgment entered in the General District Court" but that "[t]he case remains in the Circuit Court").5
In this case, the circuit court did not reaffirm the JDR court's judgment after the withdrawal of the appeal, did not file its reaffirmation order with the JDR court, and did not remand the case to the JDR court. The circuit court thus completed none of the requirements listed in the governing statutes. I cannot agree with Spear that one of those three requirements - a remand of the case to the JDR court - simply happened "automatically," Appellant's Br. at 11, 20; see also Reply Br. at 1, while the other two did not need to happen at all.
I respectfully dissent.