Legal Fictions

This multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional collection offers the first ever full-scale analysis of legal fictions. Its focus is on fictions in legal practice, examining and evaluating their roles in a variety of different areas of practice (e.g. in Tort Law, Criminal Law and Intellectual Property Law) and in different times and places (e.g. in Roman Law, Rabbinic Law and the Common Law). The collection approaches the topic in part through the discussion of certain key classical statements by theorists including Jeremy Bentham, Alf Ross, Hans Vaihinger, Hans Kelsen and Lon Fuller. The collection opens with the first-ever translation into English of Kelsen’s review of Vaihinger’s As If. The 17 chapters are divided into four parts: 1) a discussion of the principal theories of fictions, as above, with a focus on Kelsen, Bentham, Fuller and classical pragmatism; 2) a discussion of the relationship between fictions and language; 3) a theoretical and historical examination and evaluation of fictions in the common law; and 4) an account of fictions in different practice areas and in different legal cultures. The collection will be of interest to theorists and historians of legal reasoning, as well as scholars and practitioners of the law more generally, in both common and civil law traditions.

Essential reading for literary lawyers as well as the general reader, Legal Fictions is a comprehensive and entertaining literary look at a perennially fascinating and controversial subject - lawyers and the law.

This innovative book extensively probes and reveals the existence of legal fictions in international law, developing a theory of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Reece Lewis argues that, since legal fictions exist in all systems and types of law, international law is no different and deserves discrete, detailed examination.

In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison's Beloved and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen's Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Legal fictions are falsehoods that the law knowingly relies on. It is the most bizarre feature of our legal system; we know something is false, and we still assume it. But why do we rely on blatant falsehood? What are the implications of doing so? Should we continue to use fictions, and, if not, what is the alternative? Legal Fictions in Private Law answers these questions in an accessible and engaging manner, looking at the history of fictions, the theory of fictions, and current fictions from a practical perspective. It proposes a solution to what to do about fictions going forward, and how to decide whether they should be accepted or rejected. It addresses the latest literature and deals with the law in detail. This book is a comprehensive analysis of legal fictions in private law and a blueprint for reform.

Explores Thomas Hardy's engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction. Thomas Hardy's fiction is examined in this book in the context of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century as well as legal discourse in the literature of the era. The book examines the ways in which Hardy's role as a magistrate and his interest in the law impacted fundamentally on his prose fiction. It demonstrates that throughout his prose fiction Hardy engages with contentious legal issues that were debated by legal professionals and literary figures of his day, and argues that Hardy used fiction as a forum to question the extent to which legal reform improved the lives of women and the working classes.The study also looks at the ways in which Hardy deployed criminal plots derived from sensation fiction and reveals that the genre's engagement with legal reform influenced not only his sensation novel Desperate Remedies (1871) but also the plots of his subsequent fiction.

Drawing on the ancient writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic Judaism, this book comprises studies that explore the intersections of scriptural interpretation, narrative fiction, and legal rhetoric. It proposes and models methods of a non-reductive historiography for each of these communities and for both of them in comparison.