Legal Fictions as a Mechanism for Advancing Legal Development

The paper examines the essence and role of legal fiction as a mechanism for facilitating progress in law. It highlights the adverse consequences resulting from the improper incorporation of fictions into legislation and their misapplication in practice. The author argues that one source of such consequences lies in superficial and methodologically unsound theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of legal fiction, including the conflation of its legal and everyday meanings and the use in scholarly discourse of such terms as «legal illusion» and «irrebuttable presumption», which in substance amount to forms of fiction. The paper also addresses the frequent conflation of legal fictions with fictitious phenomena (facts, states, etc.). In addition, it examines artificial (fictitious) subjects of law, with particular attention to the classical legal fiction of the juridical person and to the state, which is essentially constructed as a legal person. Finally, the study notes that processes of digitalization and robotization are giving rise to new fictitious subjects and objects, including artificial intelligence.

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