Legal Fic­tions — Readings

At the center of the debates, the lin­guistic expres­sions that mark the pos­si­bility of a fictio legis or legal fiction. Those expres­sions are short and unre­markable. Fre­quently, they pass inad­ver­tently in front of one’s eyes: as if is, in English, the best known, but there is a myriad of them in Latin, or in Spanish; some­times they are mere com­par­isons, that, once examined, lead to down the rabbit hole of legal inter­pre­tation in which words become tremen­dously con­se­quential actions. How to identify legal fic­tions, how to interpret them, what kind of con­se­quences they have, and whether they have lim­i­ta­tions are some of the ques­tions asked in the col­lection of readings for this session.