Erik Encarnacion (University of Southern California) has posted On Raphael Demos's 'Legal Fictions' (Ethics, Vol. 125, 2015 Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is a taste from the paper:
Legal fictions—like the claim that corporations are persons—are ubiquitous but seemingly problematic. After all, legal fictions allow courts to confer benefits and impose burdens on the basis of falsehoods. How can this be legitimate? Answering this question requires understanding what legal fictions are and why officials adopt them.
Raphael Demos addresses these issues in Legal Fictions—one of the few discussions of the topic published in a philosophical forum.2 Legal fictions are, Demos claims, statements accepted as true by courts even though they know that, strictly speaking, they’re false (38). As a definition, this seems over‐inclusive: Judges who accept false statements in exchange for bribes don’t seem to thereby adopt legal fictions. A better definition would help distinguish between legal fictions and mere corruption.