ABSTRACT
Persons in law can be formed in four ways, explained by reference to standing, capacity, identity based on a trait, and imaginary figures. Although any of these may motivate the claim that the result is a legal fiction, that ascription does not invariably follow. The relations among persons in law and legal fictions are not straightforward because certain interpretative conditions must be satisfied to make them align. This essay explores those conditions. In both the civilian and common-law traditions, some of the most conventional techniques for making up and categorizing persons include deeming, definition, presumption, and stipulation. These techniques serve any number of other functions, but when directed at questions involving identity they often provoke controversy, and frequently enough the argument amounts to a criticism of the technique itself rather than its application. Yet that result is hardly inevitable, and lawyers and laypersons alike disagree about which legal propositions count as ways of making up persons. Some provisions involving personal characteristics seem to escape these disagreements entirely, others are seen mainly by lay readers as constituting persons, and yet others provoke disagreement along different lines that require further explanation.
Stern, Simon, Personable Reasons, Reasonable Persons, and Legal Fictions (March 19, 2026).
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