Legal fiction

The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.

— Legal fiction

It is a fiction, a shade, a nonentity, but a reality for legal purposes. A corporation aggregate is only in abstracto—it is invisible, immortal, and rests only in intendment and consideration of the law.

— Legal fiction

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

— Legal fiction

Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

— Legal fiction

It is unconscionable in a defendant, to take advantage of the apices litigandi, to turn a plaintiff round, and make him pay costs where his demand is just. Against such objections every possible presumption ought to be made, which ingenuity can suggest. How disgraceful then would it be to the administration of justice to allow Chicane to obstruct Bight; by the help of a legal fiction contrary to the help of the fact!

— Legal fiction

A fiction of law shall never be contradicted so as to defeat the end for which it was invented, but for every other purpose it may be contradicted.

— Legal fiction

Fictions of law must be consistent with justice.

— Legal fiction

Fictions are allowed against all the King's subjects for the furtherance, but never for the hindrance, of justice.

— Legal fiction

When Courts adopt a fiction they must necessarily support it.

— Legal fiction

No fiction shall extend to work an injury, its proper operation being to prevent a mischief or remedy an inconvenience which might result from the general rule of law.

— Legal fiction

In fictione juris semper cequitas existit: A legal fiction is always consistent with Equity.

— Legal fiction