This Research Handbook explores the function and significance of legal fictions, and examines the particular qualities that distinguish fictions from other legal constructs, studying their origins, historical development, doctrinal manifestations, and distinctive effects. Leading international scholars demonstrate that legal fictions are essential yet contested tools that enable the law to adapt to an ever-changing world.
Combining insights from legal theory, history, and the wider humanities, contributors conduct legal and doctrinal analysis to examine fictions across different systems. Chapters challenge the view of fictions as mere falsehoods, instead evaluating them as structured forms of legal artifice that enable the law to maintain coherence, adapt to new circumstances, and organize complex social realities. The Research Handbook demonstrates that legal fictions are not marginal anomalies but instruments through which the law constructs persons, institutions, and normative orders, thereby contributing to broader debates on legal reasoning and legitimacy.
Interdisciplinary in scope, the Research Handbook on Legal Fictions is a vital guide for scholars and students of jurisprudence, legal theory, and comparative law, as well as legal philosophy and the humanities. Legal practitioners and policymakers will also benefit from its timely discussions on the use of fictions across civil and common law traditions.
