ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer an alternative to the classical understanding of legal fictions as counterfactual assumptions. Using a particular type of legal fictions (statutory fictions) and a diachronic perspective that spans from Roman law to the quasi-realist system of the current civil codes, the chapter reassesses the relationship between legal rules, legal conceptualization and a proposed external reality. I intend to show that the linguistic nature of statutory fictions provides valuable insights for a general definition of fictional discourse that is not bound to the classical truefalse dichotomy, the latter still being inherent in the majority of today’s approaches to legal fictionality.
