Marmor on Law as Authoritative Fiction

Andrei Marmor, Cornell University Law School, has published Law as Authoritative Fiction as Cornell Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-10. Here is the abstract.

Law, like fiction, is one of those domains in which the saying so makes it so. The main purpose of this essay is to show how various aspects of law and fiction are closely related, and how they exhibit features that are generally shared by expressive artifacts. Both law and fiction belong to a type of intangible artifacts, created by communicative means, giving rise to closed prefixed contexts in which truths in that context are constituted by performative speech acts. The law, however, is very much unlike fiction in that it is essentially authoritative. I conclude by showing how law’s spacio-temporal aspect, which it does not share with most other expressive artifacts, derives from its authoritative nature.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.