Simon Stern (University of Toronto Faculty of Law) has posted Legal Fictions, in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, ed. Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (London: Elgar, 2025), 299-301, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The term ‘legal fiction’ misleadingly implies that a certain set of legal doctrines and concepts, by virtue of being fictions, have distinctively literary qualities that we would not find elsewhere in the law. Yet even if they are no more literary than ‘non-fictional’ doctrines, legal fictions have long been source of fascination and criticism for writers of imaginative works. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, literary treatments of legal fictions usually concerned themselves with procedural fictions, which stipulated a certain state of affairs so that a court could assert jurisdiction over a person or dispute. Following the procedural reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, literary uses of legal fictions have been more concerned with problems of personhood and identity. Thomas Holcroft’s The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794) illustrates the earlier phase, and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) illustrates the later phase.
Recommended.