On Monday, 8 June, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online on Teams by clicking here), Stephen Sachs (Harvard) – will give an SCLP seminar titled “Truth in Legal Fiction”. You can find the paper here (pre-reading is optional). The abstract is in below.

Abstract

Truth in law can be usefully analogized to truth in fiction. As others have observed, a legal system tells a certain kind of story. It sets up a world of fantastical entities, such as “contracts,” “corporations,” “claims,” or “constructive trusts”; it describes a variety of interesting relations among them; and it sets forth a complex web of duties and powers that some of them possess toward others. Asking what’s true in a given legal system (who owns the lamb of a leased sheep, whether the murderer benefits from his victim’s will, and so on) is like asking what’s true in the world of a fictional work (when Sherlock Holmes was born, whether Macbeth saw or hallucinated Banquo’s ghost, and so on): it takes certain things as given and asks what else would also be true. In this way exploring the “imaginary normative landscape” of a legal system is very much like exploring a fictional world. And this comparison to truth-in-fiction isn’t just a curiosity: it sheds real light on real puzzles about law and legal reasoning.